Dems pick health care scab again
Posted: Sunday, April 20, 2008 12:29 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan
LANCASTER, Pa. -- Both Democratic candidates picked over an old bone of
attack as they competed for voters in Pennsylvania today, airing
competing ads on the debate over health-care mandates and issuing
rebuttals to each other on the stump.
“And I know that you know Sen.
Clinton's been running these ads saying, 'Oh Barack's not really insuring everybody,’"
Obama said in Lancaster today.
"Let me tell you -- let me in fairness say, 'Senator Clinton's got a
good plan, but keep in mind, when she says she's covering more people
that's because she's got a mandate. It's not a mandate for the
government to provide health insurance. It’s that you buy health
insurance even if you cant afford it. Even if the prices aren't low
enough."
Obama promised that under his plan, affordability wouldn't be an issue.
"And my attitude is the reason that people don't have health insurance
is not because they don't want it, it's ’cause they can't afford it,"
he said. "That's why we're gonna lower costs and subsidize everybody,
so that everybody can afford it. There will not be a single person in
America who wants health insurance who cannot get health insurance when
I am president of the United States of America."
Earlier in the day, Sen. Clinton had said that she found Obama's new
television ad "curious" since his plan leaves 15 million Americans
uninsured.
"Afford," the ad the campaign started airing yesterday, attacks Clinton for "forcing people to buy health insurance even if they can't afford it."
The back and forth over health care mandates, which has lead to heated exchanges between the candidates, has largely laid by the wayside in the six weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. However, there's a little more than 48 hours before voters start going to the polls, and Obama is barn storming the state drawing sharp contrasts with Clinton.
He has hit the issue of healthcare over and over again, characterizing the real differences between the two candidates as one that focuses on who can actually get legislation passed rather than the policy differences between the two.
"If you are feeling cynical and your basic attitude is, 'You know what, things can't really change,' then you may decide that Sen. Clinton's your choice, because that's the game that's played in Washington and we just want somebody who knows how to play the game," he said in Downington yesterday afternoon.
He added: "But see my attitude is that if you take that choice, we're just gonna tape it around the edges. We will end up obviously getting something better than George Bush, but we're not gonna actually deliver on big health care reform, we're not actually gonna deliver on major energy reform. I'm running not just to play the game better in Washington; I am running to put an end to the game playing."
He also pushed back on Clinton's lobbyist ad, in which she says that Obama takes money from special interests. "Now she's running an ad saying well Obama's taking lobbyist money, and PAC money, and all this stuff running another negative ad," he said.
And he pledged to the crowd: "Let me tell you something. What we do is not perfect. But I can tell you this, in this presidential campaign, I have not taken a dime of lobbyist money. I have not taken a dime of PAC money."
