Richardson's Health Plan Wouldn't Raise Taxes

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

MONEY MATTERS

Richardson's Health Plan Wouldn't Raise Taxes

Bill Richardson joined the health-care policy fray yesterday, offering his own plan for universal coverage and taking a veiled shot at his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination -- even though the main elements of his plan resemble proposals presented by other candidates.

Speaking in Iowa, the New Mexico governor said he would provide coverage for the 45 million Americans who currently lack it through a combination of steps: expanding Medicare eligibility to people as young as 55, letting people keep their parents' coverage up to age 25, expanding coverage for children via Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and providing a sliding-scale tax credit for people buying their own coverage. Under his plan, all Americans would be required to get health insurance.

Richardson says he could do all this without tax increases -- the proposal's $110 billion annual cost would be covered by making health-care delivery more efficient, allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug costs and requiring businesses that do not provide health insurance to contribute toward helping the uninsured buy coverage.

"We cannot afford a health-care system that doesn't cover every American," he said. "The cost to our economy and the well-being of our people is just too high."

Plans offered by both John Edwards and Barack Obama, like Richardson's plan, would require employers who do not provide coverage to contribute to covering the uninsured. And Edwards, like Richardson, would make health insurance mandatory.

The major difference among the plans, though, is that Richardson says he could pay for his through savings and efficiencies, without raising taxes. Both Edwards and Obama say that savings alone won't be enough and that they would pay the difference by letting President Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy expire. Many health-care experts say it is all but impossible to provide universal coverage without raising taxes.

Richardson disagrees. "We will not need to raise taxes," he wrote in an op-ed in the Quad-City Times. "By streamlining the system, increasing efficiency, and asking everyone to pay their fair share, we can make accessible, affordable health care a reality for everyone."

-- Alec MacGillis

THE POLITICS OF RACE

Black Journalists Will Ask If Obama Is Black Enough

A day before Barack Obama speaks to the National Association of Black Journalists at its convention in Las Vegas on Friday, a forum will be held to ask a question that annoys the Illinois senator's wife: Is he "black enough?"

A session hosted by Michel Martin of National Public Radio, according to NABJ's program, will grapple with "a question that no one else is confronting." The program continues: "This candidate is Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama, and the question he cannot seem to shake -- is he black enough? Is this an unfair question? What is the measure of blackness and who gets to decide?"

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, published Sunday, Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife, said: "The truth of the matter is that as I was growing up, talking too proper, going to certain schools, people told me that. We are still struggling as a people with what is black," she said.

"The thing that I worry most about . . . is not what it says about me and Barack," Michelle Obama said. "What does it say to our children? That somehow Michelle Obama is not black enough? Well, shoot, if I'm not black enough and Barack's not black enough, well, who are they supposed to be in this world?"

She disputed the notion that Obama's upbringing in Hawaii was different from hers on Chicago's predominantly black South Side.

"He was raised in his grandmother's home, and his grandmother is from Kansas, eating tuna with pickles in it," she told the Sun-Times. "The same conversations that we had around my kitchen table, we have at her house on Christmas. We are not that far apart. It's just that it feels like people have benefited from us feeling and believing that we are far apart."

"I'm fundamentally a girl from the South Side," she said. "I may change the cadence of [my speech], you know if you are home, you're just home, but the stories are the same. I think people want leaders that they can connect to," she said.

-- Perry Bacon Jr.

SOOTHSAYING

Giuliani Predicts Clinton-Obama Ticket

Add another title to the résumé of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani: pundit. Yesterday, Giuliani predicted that Democrats will choose Hillary Clinton to be their presidential nominee and that she will pick Barack Obama to be her running mate.

Campaigning in rural Iowa, Giuliani told reporters, "I think it's going to be a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket." According to the Daily Telegraph, he added: "They will run together because Barack Obama has had such a good showing and it's going to be very hard for her to deny him a place on the ticket."

-- Michael D. Shear