I don't quite agree with the DLC's contention that the three Democrats' healthcare plans "closely track the architecture for universal health coverage long advocated by the Progressive Policy Institute and the DLC," (every plan has a public option: Where was yours, DLC?), but whatever. It's certainly true that:
these differences [between Democratic plans] pale in comparison to the vast gulf that seems to be opening up in the two parties' approach to health care. President Bush continues to advocate an erosion of existing public programs on budgetary grounds, while offering nothing positive other than a variety of shopworn conservative policy gimmicks that really add up to an attack on collective purchasing of health insurance and even on the basic idea of spreading health care risks through insurance. With one exception, the Republican presidential candidate field echoes the atavistic Bush vision of a health care system in which individuals are left on their own to buy medical services in expensive and unregulated markets, with or without access to insurance. And the one exception, Mitt Romney, appears to be trying to distance himself from his own state of Massachusetts' universal health care initiative, which resembles the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama plans much more than those of any Republican.
And we should be clear about what this means: The Republican vision is for a world in which the sick and dying get to deduct some of the cost of health insurance that they don't have -- and can't get -- on their taxes. The Democratic vision is for every American to have health insurance. We clear?
