NYT series on candidates and issues: Health Care Up to Public, Edwards Says

If Elected ...
On Health Care
This series examines how the 2008 presidential candidates would handle the issues they would confront as president.

Health Care Up to Public, Edwards Says
By KEVIN SACK
Published: January 25, 2008

PATRICK, S.C. — Former Senator John Edwards does not discount the possibility that his health care proposal, which would allow Americans to buy new government insurance packages modeled on Medicare, could evolve into a federalized system like those in Canada and many European countries. And if it does, Mr. Edwards said he would be just fine with that. But Mr. Edwards, of North Carolina, emphasized in a 40-minute interview on health policy that the choice would be made not in Washington, but by consumers in an open marketplace where private insurance competes with government plans.

“American health consumers will decide which works best,” Mr. Edwards said Wednesday afternoon while traveling through South Carolina on his campaign bus. “It could continue to be divided. But it could go in one direction or the other, and one of the directions is obviously government or single-payer. And I’m not opposed to that.”

Each of the three Democratic front-runners has called for government insurance that would be available to an expanded number of consumers, not just the elderly and disabled as is currently the case with Medicare. If the government is able to undercut private insurers on price — by forgoing profit, reducing overhead, and maximizing economies of scale — it theoretically could put the private system out of business and become the de facto insurer for the nation.

Republican candidates and policy strategists have raised the specter of “socialized medicine” and depicted the Democratic plans as a back-door route to a so-called single-payer government system. Mr. Edwards brushed off that critique. “There is nothing back-door about it,” he said. “It’s right through the front door. We’re going to let America decide what health care system works for them.”...

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Though he was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry in 2004, Mr. Edwards has yet to win a primary or caucus, and is polling third before Saturday’s Democratic primary here in his birth state. Regardless of his prospects, he argues that his populist campaign has driven his party’s debate on health care by being the first to produce a comprehensive plan intended to cover all 47 million uninsured....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/us/politics/25edwards.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1201287694-eSblus/ojEfW91Zrj1idCA