Hillary’s Health Plan

John Edwards has his health plan. So do Barack Obama and Bill Richardson. And now Hillary Clinton has her health plan, too.

She announced it Monday. It would provide universal healthcare for every man, woman and child in America. It would cost around $100 billion. It would be paid for by rolling back George Bush’s tax cuts for Americans making over $250,000 a year.

No sooner did Hillary announce her plan than John Edwards and others started sniping: “Her plan’s not as good as mine.”

Forget it. From a quick reading, there’s very little difference between Hillary’s plan and John’s plan — or Bill’s or Barack’s. And all four of them are very similar to Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts.

The only candidate with a really different plan — in my mind, still the best — is Dennis Kucinich, with his single-payer plan.

Voters are not Talmudic scholars. They’re never going to sit down and analyze the subtle differences between the various healthcare plans, and shouldn’t be expected to.

What’s important is that so many candidates in both parties, so far, agree on two things: (1) It’s simply unacceptable that 47 million citizens of the richest nation on earth have no health insurance; and (2) It’s government’s role to fix the problem.

Any candidate who doesn’t agree doesn’t deserve to be president.