The Return of Hillarycare

Hillary Clinton was on the "Today" show yesterday, and "Good Morning America," and "Morning Joe," and "American Morning" and a few others I probably missed.

How heartwarming to know that our nation's morning shows have such a deep and abiding interest in health-care reform. They even broke away from O.J. for a bit!

Now John Edwards and Barack Obama may have been on every breakfast show around when they unveiled their health-care plans, but for some reason I don't remember that.

Maybe--and this is just a wild theory--these programs are just happy to have Hill, no matter what she wants to talk about.

Still, there were substantive questions about one of the thorniest problems facing the country this side of whether Britney gets to keep custody of her kids.

Hillary was on message in her media blitz, stressing that she learned from her 1993-94 debacle as first lady, believes in building consensus and is taking a more modest approach this time around. And she rarely went two or three sentences without noting that if you're happy with your doctor and medical care, you can keep things the way they are and nothing changes--a departure from her ultra-complicated scheme last time around. After all, it's a political loser to think that people are going to sacrifice their own health care to help cover the 47 million uninsured.

The question now is whether the media have enough interest to help conduct a sustained debate on this complicated subject or just record the Harry & Louise-style attacks back and forth.

Lefty commentators tend to like Hillarycare 2.0, including Ezra Klein:

"The policy is very, very sound, and includes other sundry goodies like a Best Practices Institute that will vastly accelerate the amount of research done and distributed on the cost-effectiveness of treatments, better chronic care incentives, and so forth . . .

"The only question is how serious of a proposal it is, i.e., whether it's what she plans to fight for from her first day in office, or whether it's to keep Edwards and Obama from opening up an advantage on her left flank. For now, there's no way to know."

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum likes the Clinton plan the best because, well, because she's Hillary:

"Although the three leading Democratic presidential candidates have proposed healthcare plans that are similar in a lot of ways, Hillary's strikes me as not just substantively as good as any of them (and better in some ways), but also the politically savviest and most practical of the lot. Given her experience in 1994 (she knows what won't work) combined with the legislative canniness she seems to have developed in the Senate (she know what will work), that's not too surprising."