by John McCormick
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa – Sen. Barack Obama today defended his health care proposal, a key issue with voters and one that has emerged as a dispute between him and his leading Democratic nomination rivals.
“There have been some folks — some other candidates — who said that it’s not possible to provide universal health care coverage unless there’s a mandate,” the Illinois Democrat said. “The reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it. It’s because they can’t afford it. And if we make health insurance affordable, then people will buy it.”
The dispute re-emerged last week during a debate in Las Vegas, when Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York challenged Obama on the fact that his proposal would not require coverage for all.
“When it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that,” Clinton said then.
Obama maintains mandating coverage is not essential and pointed to state requirements for automobile insurance that have failed to translate into universal coverage.
“There may be a few people, mainly young people, who think they are going to live forever, who decide not to get health insurance, even when it is affordable,” Obama said. “If we see that people are still not covered, when we’ve made it affordable, then we will figure out how to make sure that everyone has coverage.”
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Obama praised Clinton’s efforts for trying to get universal health care in the 1990s, but also offered criticism.
“They basically went behind closed doors,” he said. “I want to do it the exact opposite…I’m going to have a big table and I’m going to have everyone represented.”
Obama said his health care plan is “basically the same” as those offered by Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
“The one difference is, as I said, John Edwards and Hillary, they want to impose a mandate,” he said. “They want to say, you’ve got to buy health insurance.”
Clinton’s campaign stressed Saturday that there are differences.
“It’s unfortunate that Sen. Obama didn’t have the political will to produce a universal health care plan,” Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said in a statement. “The real difference is that her plan covers every American and Sen. Obama’s leaves 15 million without insurance.”
Obama also offered a funny riff on all the expensive television advertising offered by drug companies.
“People are running through the fields, and they’re all smiling, but you don’t know what it’s for. You just hear about the side effects,” he said. “You know, this may cause diarrhea. If you have shortness of breath. It’s like, what is this drug for? I don’t know. Except there’s that one you do know, right? The middle-aged couple is all smiling at each other. You know what that one’s for.”
Obama worked to shed any cobwebs from his campaign trail presentation, following a two-day Thanksgiving break at home in Chicago. “I ate too much,” Obama confessed to his first audience of the day.
The stop at a high school here was his first of a two-day swing through western and central Iowa.