universal health care??

With the presidential elections starting to really get in the swing of the campaigning, I've been trying to stay on top of the candidates and the important issues. One of the issues that has caused a good deal of debate within the democratic candidates is health care. The controversy has been mainly between Clinton and Obama who both have plans to make health care more widely available to Americans, yet are going about that in different ways. Clinton's plan would call for a heath insurance mandate, everyone would be required by law to have health insurance. Obama is taking a different course of action. He states that the issue doesn't lie with Americans' not having health care because they don't want it, they don't have it because they can't afford it. He says that he will create a health care plan that would not mandate health insurance, but instead make it affordable. There has been a great deal of criticism about both of the candidate's plans saying that each of them will leave millions uninsured. Recently the Clinton campaign has asked the Obama campaign to pull one of his ads about the health care issue. I read an article about it on the Chicago Tribune website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-clinton_for_webdec01,1,2634508.story

I'm glad that health care is playing such a big role in the issues for this upcoming election. I think that through our discussions in class we were able to show that this is an important issue and one that has to be seriously dealt with. In all the debates I've watched and articles that I've read, both Obama and Clinton have been criticizing the others plan and saying that theirs will better aide the American population. Yet they seem to be talking around their plan, as most politicians do. Clinton's plan is to mandate it, Obama's to make it more affordable, but I haven't heard either of them talk about how exactly they're planning on putting their plan into action. Both plans have the potential to bring health insurance to millions of people that are currently uninsured, but because no one is talking about specifics, it's hard to know how exactly each will work. Clinton's plan is to mandate health insurance, but what happens if someone can't afford the insurance, and if it's up to employers to provide health care, what if someone is unemployed? In the most recent Democratic debate, I didn't get an answer to any of these questions. It seems as though all the back and forth mud-slinging and criticism is taking away from answering the real questions. I just hope that whoever gets elected will be able to make a positive change in the area of health care.