Originally I was gonna talk about affirmative action, but instead here's how I feel about the two candidates on...
Part #4: Health Care
You Democrats (and a lot of you Republicans) will be surprised with my answer here.
A certain candidate of the two major parties has a better plan for health care.
And it's not John McCain; it's not the person I voted for.
Barack Obama has made great strides in the area of health care. I would even argue that he won the Democratic nomination because of it.
Essentially, Barack Obama's health care policy is a weaker, more ineffective version of Mitt Romney's universal health care plan for Massachusetts. In case you don't know, the three main focuses of that are:
-Getting people who are eligible for government subsidies to sign up for them.
-Providing health care to those who can't afford it, yet don't qualify for said programs.
-Forcing people wealthy enough to pay for health coverage to get it, and not clog up the system.
Obama took that broad outline, and gave it a liberal tilt. I'll invite you all to visit the Obama website to check that one out.
So, unlike the policies of Hillary Clinton/John Edwards, which are ABSOLUTELY socialist, Barack Obama's health care is quite the contrary, with only moderate degrees of socialism embedded in it.
My main concern with Obama's policy, however, is that rather than require the states take this responsibility (such as how Massachusetts did) for this issue, he proposes that the federal government manage health care.
Uh...huh. Are you really going to tell me that the federal government will do this better than state governments, which have time and time again pleased their constituencies more than the federal government?
So, if Obama is serious about this issue, then what he should do is work with the states. We've seen with the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security how ineffective bureaucratic things can be if states aren't guaranteed their rights to handle such matters.
I fear that Obama's plan is too ignorant of that. But, they are on the right track. Good job.
John Mccain has a much more sophisticated understanding of the health care problem than Barack Obama, but his solution is simply non-existent. On the stump, he has repeatedly emphasized how it is the cost of coverage that is the root of our crisis.
And he's right.
But his only really prevalent suggestion on the stump has been to give every family a $5,000 tax credit.
Am I hearing this right, Senator McCain?
You, an opponent of wasteful spending, support a plan that will offer hardly any short term relief, yet no long-term solutions on the budget _and_ health care?
Of course there is much, much more to both of their policy plans, but these are the talking points - these are the issues they choose to present to us, the American voters.
VERDICT:
Barack Obama clearly has the better plan on health care. But with that said, his plan is more likely to lead to greater abuses/mismanagement from the federal government.
Neither of them have what I consider to be a truly legitimate vision for health care. Team Obama, though, has crafted an almost tolerable alternative.
