Picture John McCain and Barack Obama as scrubs-attired trauma surgeons racing for the emergency room, ready to apply the paddles to the heart of America's ailing health-care system.
They've both loaded up their crash carts with plenty of life-saving tools, as they ponder strategies to deal with the staggering number of Americans without health insurance, ever-rising medical costs, and patient-safety concerns.
Once they burst through the swinging doors, though, they're likely to discover that neither has developed a miracle cure. McCain's health plan, for instance, calls for dabbling a bit in experimental medicine, while Obama's hopes could exceed his healing powers.
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viewers enjoying the waning episodes of the TV series, American voters should be riveted to the presidential contenders' ideas.
Health-care reform has ranked only behind Iraq as a public concern among Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. The faltering economy will likely boost Americans' unease over health care since most families' medical coverage is tied to their jobs.
Workplace coverage is eroding across the country at an incremental but steadily growing rate. Meanwhile, the cost of the nation's $2 trillion health-care system consumes nearly 20 cents of every dollar Americans earn. Industries, especially automakers, are struggling under the weight of annual health premiums, which average more than $12,000 for a family of four.
Then there are the 47 million uninsured. Their numbers have grown by 10 million since the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration made the last concerted push to repair the nation's health safety net.
Today's presidential contenders both offer detailed strategies to deal with this array of complex challenges. In some respects, their ideas run along parallel tracks, including: modernizing the health-care system with greater use of technology, driving down drug prices through competition, targeting better prevention and management of chronic diseases, promoting quality care, and coordinating patient care more closely.
That bodes well for incremental reform, at least, no matter who wins. But who's got the big fix for the problem of the uninsured? And can the next president and Congress even afford to spend what it would take, in light of a predicted federal deficit in 2009 approaching $500 billion?
In terms of getting coverage to the uninsured, Obama appears to have the better plan. He proposes a straightforward expansion of the private insurance system that would subsidize premiums for the working poor - mostly paid for by repealing the Bush tax cuts. But the costs also would be shared by businesses that don't provide medical benefits, as well as consumers.
Obama would seek to drive down insurance premiums by enacting a take-all-comers rule for insurers - thus enlarging the pool of potential insurance buyers - and by monitoring fairness and quality through a national clearinghouse.
If the Obama plan weren't missing one critical element, it just might work.
But his plan could flop because it lacks a mandate that the uninsured actually purchase those newly affordable health plans. Hillary Clinton had the idea here, knowing that too many people would wait until they were really sick to buy coverage if they were assured by law they couldn't be refused a policy. That would doom the whole effort to help the uninsured.
But the remedy for Obama is easy: embrace a universal mandate for all Americans to buy health insurance, then find the means to help them purchase that coverage.
The trouble for McCain in capitalizing on any shortcoming of Obama's health plan is that his proposal to expand access to insurance seems bound to unnecessarily tick off the millions of people who have workplace insurance.
McCain would let those people keep their office health plans, but he'd nudge the country in the direction of having more people buy their own insurance policies.
In the short-term, McCain's proposal for tax credits of $2,500 per person and $5,000 for families would enable more of the working poor to afford to get health insurance. But he'd also risk further rattling traditional workplace-based health insurance due to changes in tax treatment for the money employers would spend on health plans.
To pay for his tax credits, McCain would end the tax break given workers whose health care is paid for them at work. That's bound to be unpopular, since it places the cost squarely on individual taxpayers and appears to go too easy on businesses. It makes no provision, for instance, for levying fees on free riders - those businesses that don't provide health plans.
McCain also doesn't have a solid answer for covering those Americans whose existing illnesses prevent them from finding insurance at almost any price.
He does not mandate that insurers accept all clients. Instead, McCain proposes the federal government work with states to set up insurance pools that protect high-risk patients from catastrophic health costs. Trouble is, health-care finance experts say the idea just doesn't seem to be affordable on any grounds, even less so for a balanced-budget candidate who says he won't raise taxes.
McCain isn't wrong to explore moving away from workplace-based health insurance. Giving Americans health coverage they could take from job to job would be a boon. In fact, it's the cornerstone of the most promising reform proposal from Congress, the bipartisan Healthy Americans Act from Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Robert Bennett (R., Utah). But for his plan to work, McCain would have to embrace the more comprehensive approach in Wyden-Bennett proposal.
Both presidential candidates have to decide whether they're really willing to follow through on the treatments they're prescribing.