Edwards’ stiff healthcare medicine: taxes

Betting that voter concern over healthcare outweighs disdain for higher taxes, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Monday proposed repealing President Bush’s tax cuts on high-income Americans to finance a universal healthcare plan.

The plan would cover all 47 million of the nation’s uninsured by 2012, the former North Carolina senator said. The annual cost to taxpayers would be $90 billion to $120 billion, most of it covered by a tax increase on families making more than $200,000 a year.

The plan would require employers to provide health coverage to workers or help them buy insurance. To hold down the cost of premiums for millions of Americans, it would allow employers and consumers to join regional insurance pools that purchased coverage in bulk. The plan would also expand Medicaid and other public health programs.

Edwards’ explicit call for a tax increase to broaden access to healthcare could carry wide appeal among Democratic primary voters. But if he wins the nomination, it risks exposing him to Republican attacks in a general election race, just as Walter Mondale, President Reagan’s Democratic challenger in 1984, was pilloried for proposing higher taxes.

The Edwards plan comes as he is trying to sharpen distinctions between himself and rivals for the Democratic nomination, particularly Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.

Like Edwards, both support universal healthcare, but neither has released a specific plan. Last week, Clinton said she hoped to build consensus on politically feasible elements of a plan before releasing one; Obama said he was working with experts to develop his own proposal.

Other Democratic White House contenders who have vowed to broaden access to health coverage include New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sens. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware.

But Edwards is the first to provide details. In a telephone interview, he said he did not expect his plan to draw any storm of opposition, as the Clinton White House did with its failed effort, led by Hillary Clinton, to overhaul health coverage in the 1990s. “I think it’s appealing across the ideological and political spectrum,” he said.

The Edwards proposal would set up regional coverage-purchasing pools that would offer competing insurance plans. The nonprofit pools would be available to consumers who did not get coverage through their jobs, and to employers that decided to join rather than offer their own insurance plans. The idea would be for the pools to negotiate lower premiums through economies of scale. One of the insurance plans offered by each pool would be a public program modeled after Medicare.

The proposal would also make more people eligible for taxpayer-subsidized healthcare under Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and it would create a new tax credit to offset insurance costs for some middle-class families. Once those steps were taken, Americans would be required to have insurance.

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michael.finnegan@latimes.com