Barack Obama's plan for health care would outperform and be more efficient than the scheme offered by John McCain, according to new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released last week.
Examining cost, efficiency, and coverage, the Obama plan would cover more uninsured people and cost less per capita over the first ten-year period of its existence to do so than McCain's plan, according to the data.
While McCain would offer a plan that costs $1.3 trillion, about $300 billion less than Obama's, estimates by the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center suggest that McCain's proposal would cover as few as five percent of the 47 million people currently without health care coverage (expected to grow to over 60 million over the next few years). Obama's would reach up to half of the uninsured.
Thus, McCain's plan, if it were actually designed to reach the same number of uninsured people, would cost as much as seven times more than the Obama plan, according to EPI estimates.
The two plans are vastly different in structure and philosophy as well. McCain's plan is ideologically affiliated with the George W. Bush "ownership society" in which individuals are told to find and pay for costly health insurance on their own. McCain's proposal would provide economic and tax incentives to employers to eliminate employment-based coverage and force working families to find and pay for insurance on their own.
McCain's plan calls for taxing health care benefits as income and providing a meager tax credit to subsidize family insurance plans. Over time, reports EPI, "the value of the tax benefit will eventually be overwhelmed by higher costs for insurance premiums."
Because the program pushes individuals into the health care market alone and reduces subsidies, it would also cause many people to by less comprehensive insurance, raising the out-of-pocket expenses to individuals for medical care. Higher costs of insurance premiums under the McCain plan would simply mean that many others would go without any coverage at all.
By contrast, reports EPI, Obama’s plan would reform the health care system in three ways.
1) It would build on the employer-sponsored insurance concept.
2) Obama proposes expanding existing public insurance programs such as widening eligibility for Medicare and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to cover those who do not have employer-funded health care benefits.
3) Obama's plan would provide access to the federal government's insurance pool, such as that which members of Congress have access to, for those without employment benefits or eligibility for public programs.
In addition to this, Obama's plan would provide subsidies to ensure these programs are affordable and would not tax health benefits as income.
Obama's plan is based on the notion that a comprehensive social solution to the health care crisis is more efficient, costs less, and covers more people than the policy offered by McCain.
Advocates for universal health care will likely be disappointed that Obama's three-tier proposal may not accomplish universal coverage quickly enough. Proponents of a universally expanded Medicare system in a National Health Insurance Program, as that proposed in H.R. 676, a bill introduced in Congress by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), believe it would be the most efficient and universal program. It would control costs by eliminating profit-motive from health care and would provide cradle-to-grave full coverage.
