What is Barack Obama's position on healthcare?

Answer 1

His health care plan would cut 15 million off. It is also a dog's breakfast that few want. His plan also like himself, lacks audacity.


That Obama health care plan is a dog's breakfast of bad ideas from Left, Right, and center, topped with an unhealthy amount of wishful thinking. If enacted it would cost Americans dearly — in higher taxes, lost jobs, reduced freedom of choice, and lower quality health care.


Obama’s health care plan is not universal (Hillary’s plan is universal), and it lacks audacity. Obama’s’ plan is like himself – full of hope but not deliverable.

Compared to John Edwards, who had a detailed plan, and Hillary Clinton, whose fluency with the subject is unmatched among the contenders, he seemed uncertain and adrift. An Associated Press article asked, "Is Obama all style and little substance?"

Number one, he didn't make sure everybody is in. There is perhaps no more surprising fact about Obama's plan than that it is not universal. It is certainly sold as if it is. In his speech unveiling the proposal, Obama bragged that, "[m]y plan begins by covering every American." But it doesn't. To say otherwise is rhetorical overreach, the appropriation of a popular and broadly-supported goal without an attendant mechanism for achieving it.

There are a few ways to achieve universal health care. You can create a single-payer plan that enrolls the population automatically. This is what Canada does, and how Medicare covers the elderly. You can create an employer mandate, where the primary responsibility falls on workplaces, and smaller mandates mop up the remainder. That was the approach showcased in the Clinton reforms of the early '90s. You can create an individual mandate that charges every American with procuring health insurance, and penalizes them if they don't. This is the approach favored by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Ron Wyden in the Senate, and John Edwards in the presidential campaign. Obama's plan offers none of these approaches.

Instead, it seeks to make care cheaper and more accessible, assuming that, if it succeeds — and that's a big if — Americans will enroll of their own volition. It is a plan with the potential to be universal, rather than a universal plan. In that respect, it is very much like Obama himself.

Few are looking to Clinton for details, as her public record is so well-known, and her policy commitments so lengthily expressed. It is Obama who has remained a relative cipher, the interplay of his ideology and political instincts opaque. Obama’s plan lacks details, and skeptics say Obama is merely an inspiring speaker than a practical health care advocate.

Obama’s failing, somewhat ironically, is a lack of audacity. It accepts the sectioning off of the market into the employed, the unemployed, the old, the young, and the poor. It does not consolidate the system into a coherent whole, preferring instead to preserve the patchwork quilt of programs and insurers that make health care so difficult to navigate. It does not sever the link between employment and health insurance, nor take a firm step towards single-payer, despite Obama's professed preference for such a system.

Obama's plan is not dissimilar from Obama himself — sold with stunning rhetoric and grand hopes, but never quite delivering on the promises and potential. And so he remains the candidate of almosts.

Answer 2

Barack Obama favored to have a universal healthcare for Americans and it is the reason why he is being supported by many voters.

Answer 3

Other than being "free" I don't think he has a position.

Answer 4

Um I think he wants us to just stay still until they are ready to strike is what I hear! Thats a plan eh!

Answer 5

NOTHING Is Free say good buy to your money
own nothing they will steal it all.

Go Ron Paul 2008

http//:www.ronpaul2008.com

Answer 6

He supports universal heathcare, but has come under fire because his healthcare plan doesn't cover everyone.

Answer 7

Everything. He simply wants to make sure that all of us can afford it.

Answer 8

"Free" healthcare for EVERYONE! WOOO HOOO!