Health care, strong issue in U.S. but not has hot as Energy and Economy, per The New York Times report
12 09 08 - 11:51
Health Care Issue, Not Quite Hot, Remains Strong
By KEVIN SACK - The New York Times
ROSWELL, Ga. — When Representative Tom Price spoke to the Roswell Kiwanians the other day, the first three questions concerned health care. When he appeared four days later before the Sandy Springs Rotarians, no one asked about it at all.
As energy and the economy consume more of the country’s political discourse, health care is an issue that can seem to vacillate in importance by the day, the place and the audience.
It remains a significant presence in virtually every Congressional district, including this well-heeled Atlanta suburb represented by Mr. Price, a second-term Republican. In some contests, particularly those where Democrats smell blood, it has been placed front and center. But in others it has become less distinct, absorbed by the electorate’s broader anxiety over the economy and displaced by the urgency of high-cost gasoline and the housing crisis.
“Energy has kind of taken the wind out of — no pun intended — all sorts of other things,” Mr. Price said, campaigning in his district, which was once represented by Newt Gingrich. “But health care is still in the top three issues, and it is for every single demographic group.”
With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the sidelines, health care is also receiving somewhat less emphasis in the presidential race, although each campaign is busy stoking fears about the other’s proposals.
Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, is arguing that Senator John McCain’s plan to end the tax bias against those who buy insurance individually, and to replace it with health care tax credits for all, would increase costs for many consumers and leave others underinsured.
Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, is charging that Mr. Obama’s proposal, which would allow the privately insured to maintain their coverage while creating a heavily subsidized government plan for the uninsured, would “force families into a government-run health care system.”
Advocacy groups, meanwhile, are spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising to keep the issue at the forefront of the 2009 Congressional agenda. And working groups, both inside and outside Congress, are meeting to search for points of bipartisan agreement that might produce at least incremental change.
Polls show not that concern about health care has faded significantly, only that the foreboding about energy and the economy has blitzed past it. Some analysts of health care politics argue that because Democrats are more associated with the issue, any de-emphasis may help Republicans. They warn, however, that candidates ignore health care at their own peril.
“It’s generally more helpful to Democrats than to Republicans, so when health care is subsumed into the economy it may not have as much of an edge,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, one of the advocacy groups behind the new “Harry and Louise” television commercials about the plight of the uninsured. “But in terms of what people want to hear candidates talk about, they certainly want to hear something about health care.”
That message is not lost on Mr. Price, one of 13 medical doctors in Congress. An orthopedic surgeon, the son and grandson of physicians, he speaks regularly about health care on the stump, saying it is “broken beyond repair by nibbling at the sides.” He has polled voters on the issue and mailed out fliers explaining his positions.
As a Republican and a physician, Mr. Price says, it distresses him that his party has allowed health care to be defined as a Democratic issue. (In an August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 58 percent of those questioned said Mr. Obama was the presidential candidate more likely to make health care a priority, compared with 20 percent for Mr. McCain.)
“People believe Republicans don’t have a health care gene because many Republicans don’t talk about it with any frequency,” said Mr. Price, who is heavily favored to defeat his Democratic opponent, Bill Jones. “I think, however, that it is a Republican issue, because the solution embraces our conservative principles, the imperative of individuals and their families being able to make decisions. Nobody truly believes the government can solve this, save Democrat politicians.”
To prompt debate, Mr. Price has introduced legislation to allow individuals to buy insurance with pretax dollars, as is currently the case for those who purchase employer-sponsored plans. (Mr. McCain would achieve the same equity in the opposite way, by ending the exclusion from income taxes for employer plans.)
To promote universal coverage, the Price plan would also provide tax deductions and credits to all who cannot afford insurance, a proposition whose price tag to the government is unknown but certain to be expensive. And he would allow individuals to select from an array of plans rather than permitting employers to limit their choices.
The McCain plan, Mr. Price said, “is a step in the right direction.” But he said Mr. McCain’s proposed tax credits of $2,500 an individual and $5,000 a family would not be enough to make insurance affordable for everyone who needs help.
If Mr. Price seems proactive on health care, it is at least partly because he, like other Republicans, starts from a defensive stance. His opponent, Mr. Jones, plans to make a major issue of Mr. Price’s votes last year against a Democratic proposal to expand vastly the eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. President Bush twice vetoed the expansion, and Mr. Price and other Republicans helped him sustain the vetoes.
The congressman has worked to explain those votes. “People in my district,” he said, “understand that the last thing we need to be doing is moving folks from private health insurance to public health insurance, which is exactly what that bill did.”
But Mr. Jones, a former commercial pilot and Air Force veteran, said his indignation over those votes had driven him to challenge Mr. Price. “He wraps himself in his white coat while arguing why we can’t expand our health care system,” Mr. Jones said.
When provided openings, other Democrats have attacked what they see as a Republican soft spot. In the open race in Illinois’s 11th District, for instance, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has distributed two mailings calling attention to the claim by the Republican candidate, Marty Ozinga, that health care is available to all Americans. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re sick or you get hurt, you go to the hospital and you get taken care of,” Mr. Ozinga was quoted as saying on a local cable television program.
Representative Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat who heads the campaign committee, said Mr. Ozinga’s opponent, State Senator Debbie Halvorson, “is going to zero in on this like a laser beam.”
All Democratic candidates, Mr. Van Hollen said, will try to invigorate the debate over health care by emphasizing its part in the country’s economic travails.
“While there continues to be a moral issue of ensuring that our people have access to basic health care,” he said, “it’s also a family budget issue and an economic issue in an era of global competition.”
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