In the two-and-a-half weeks since Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her American Health Choices Plan, she has been highly criticized. Her opponents said that the proposal is nothing more than a disguised version of her failed health plan of 1993 – a redo announced months after the introduction of other candidates’ health care plans in an attempt to maintain her front-runner status through new media coverage.

These attacks cannot hide the meat of Clinton’s proposal, which has the potential to produce real change in the American health system. In fact, it is because of its direct descent from the failed 1993 plan that Clinton’s American Health Choices Plan is capable of tackling the societal problem that leaves 47 million people uninsured. She has learned from her mistakes and adjusted her design accordingly.

The plan she unveiled in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 17 is simpler and less radical than the one she and her husband came up with 14 years ago.

The 1993 plan entailed, among other things, large insurance groups called ‘health alliances’ and universal coverage for all citizens by 1999. People complained about the creation of big government bureaucracies, the complicated reorganization of the American economy and the potential threat to insured people who were already happy with their coverage.

Today, however, Clinton has come to realize that the American public does not want to be pushed toward a revolutionary change in health care. Rather, her new plan recognizes that the best way to move the United States toward a single-payer system – the ideal socialized medicine solution – is to provide the public with flexibility and options, not government-directed coverage.

‘I learned that people who are satisfied with their current coverage want assurances that they can keep it,’ Clinton said in her unveiling, according to The New York Times. ‘Part of our health care system is the best in the world, and we should build on it; part of the system is broken, and we should fix it.’

The new proposal suggested two bold national mandates that would bring America closer to patching up its holes in health coverage.

The first would require all individuals to buy health insurance, offering government subsidies to those who cannot afford to do so. Approximately one-third of the 47 million that are uninsured can afford health coverage, but choose not to purchase it.

The second would require insurance companies to cover all clients regardless of age or existing medical conditions. This policy will be contended the most because it is a great risk to insurance companies.

A single-payer health care system, in which the payment for hospitals, doctors and all other medical care providers would come from one central fund, is certainly ideal, but the American health care system is so flawed right now that such a drastic change is highly unfeasible. Clinton’s crawl-before-you-walk philosophy, therefore, shows the promise of change. Healthcare does not need a radical revolution – it needs evolution toward a more uniform state, which is exactly what the American Health Choices Plan offers.

Shannon McCool is a biweekly columnist for The Daily Orange. She can be reached at smmccool@syr.edu.

Published on October 3, 2007 at 12:00 pm