Clinton Presents Plan For Universal Coverage

"Senator Clinton's latest health scheme includes more government mandates, expensive federal subsidies and more big bureaucracy -- in short, a prescription for an increase in wait times, a decrease in patient care and tax hikes to pay for it all," Katie Levinson, communications director for former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said in a statement.

At a news conference, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said " 'Hillarycare' continues to be bad medicine."

Clinton's campaign, aware of the inevitable attacks, planned a careful rollout of its health-care proposal. Rather than giving a single speech on health care, she gave two addresses earlier this year on improving health-care quality and reducing costs. Her aides argued that it was particularly important for Clinton to show that her approach to reforming health care would be different this time around and focused on rebutting charges that her plan was not like the 1993 proposal.

Clinton said her plan would "not create a single new government department, agency or bureaucracy." She also took great pains to emphasize that her plan would not be radical. She emphasized that if people in the United States currently like their health-care plan, her proposal does not require them to change it.

"And I think it will and should be reassuring" to people who like their current coverage, said Gene Sperling, an economic adviser in the Clinton White House now working for the senator from New York.

Clinton's campaign dubbed the new proposal the American Health Choices Plan, and the candidate used the words "choice" and or "choose" more than a dozen times in her 45-minute address. Her proposal allows people to enroll in a public plan similar to Medicare or the program federal employees use, or to get health care through a private insurer, essentially the same options that the other Democratic candidates have proposed. Clinton decided to make choice a key feature, aiming at voters who do not like their current care and want to have options for improving it.

"What is unique to her and that no one has really done is this emphasis on choice," said Andrei Cherny, a Democratic strategist.

The plan remains a far cry from the one Clinton and the controversial 500-person task force assembled behind closed doors at the start of Bill Clinton's first term. That proposal would have required all Americans to enroll in regional health plans that were administered by either their state or the federal government. It also sought to reform the health insurance market by, in effect, creating price controls on how much insurance companies could charge.

The new plan would expand government funding for programs for low-income adults and children, and it would require employers to either insure their workers or pay a tax. It would be funded in part by not renewing tax cuts passed under the Bush administration for households that make more than $250,000 a year, something Edwards and Obama have also proposed.

Insurance companies, which aired a series of potent ads featuring a couple named "Harry and Louise" who elaborated on their concerns about the Clinton plan, remain a target. Her proposal would require insurers to offer health-care coverage to any person who applies for it, although it includes provisions for the government to help subsidize the cost.

Edwards said yesterday that if elected, he would submit legislation on his first day in office that would end health-care coverage for the president, all members of Congress and all political appointees on July 20, 2009, unless they have passed a universal health-care measure. In a statement, Obama said, "the real key to passing any health care reform is the ability to bring people together in an open, transparent process that builds a broad consensus for change," a jab at the Clinton task force of the 1990s.

Clinton made clear in the address that she is willing to work with Congress and that her plan is only outlining principles for reform.

"We're not writing every single detail of this plan," said Laurie Rubiner, her top health-care policy adviser, adding that Clinton learned her lesson in trying to be overly prescriptive. "We're going to leave a lot of this to the congressional committees."

But Clinton's advisers and the candidate herself have been clear about the direction they wanted to go, to the point that some outside experts who were consulted thought the process was really just window dressing.

And while Clinton aides have emphasized the lessons they learned from the debacle of the 1990s, they have also pointed out what they believe to be the sources of the proposals made by Obama and Edwards: the 1993 Hillary Clinton plan.

Staff writer David S. Broder contributed to this report.