Obama courts Latinos
Posted: Sunday, July 13, 2008 9:08 PM by Chuck Todd
From NBC/NJ's Athena Jones
SAN DIEGO, CA --
Obama announced a tax credit to help small businesses provide health care, adopting an idea that was part of his former rival
Hillary Clinton’s health-care proposals.
“Today, I’m announcing a new aspect of my plan to provide real relief for small business owners who are crushed by rising costs, an idea that by the way was championed by my friend Hillary Clinton, who’s been leading the way in our battle to insure every American,” he said to applause during his speech Sunday to the National Council of La Raza.
Obama said his plan would make it easier for employers to provide health benefits rather than harder for them as McCain’s would do.
“My plan won’t impose any new burdens on small businesses,” he said. “Instead, we’ll help them not just create new jobs, but good jobs -- jobs with health care; jobs that stay right here in America; the kind of jobs we need in our communities.”
The Small Business Health Tax Credit would provide a refundable credit of up to 50% on premiums paid by small businesses on behalf of their employees, but businesses would only be eligible for the credit if they “offer a quality health plan to all of their employees, and cover a meaningful share of the cost of employee health premiums” and it would be phased out for small firms with high-income employees, said a policy paper released by his campaign.
Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said Obama and the New York senator were “fully united” around the goal of ensuring affordable quality health coverage for all Americans.
“She's gratified that he is adding a proposal similar to hers for tax credits for small businesses,” Elleithee said in an email. “She's long said that it is an important tool in empowering small businesses to make a voluntary choice to provide health insurance for their employees to keep them productive and their businesses competitive. Sen. Clinton believes that the inclusion of such a measure makes Sen. Obama's health plan even stronger than it was before, and she salutes him for doing so.”
Health care was a key part of Clinton’s platform, and Obama’s decision to adopt one of her proposals is part of a larger effort to help unite his supporters and hers as he fights to win the presidency.
Obama said McCain’s answer to the health-care crisis amounted to voting against expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program and proposing what he called a “radical plan that would shred our current system of employer-based health care and tax individual workers for their health benefits for the first time in history. A plan that would be financed by a $3.6 trillion tax increase on the middle class -- an increase of more than $1,000 for the typical family.”
As he has argued before, the senator said many Americans could lose their health care under McCain’s plan and pay more in taxes for the health care they receive.
Obama’s plan would cost an estimated about $6 billion a year. He would pay for it by creating “a pathway for generic biologic drugs, which will increase market competition and lower federal spending on prescription drugs accounting for a growing share of the overall drug market,” according to the policy paper.
The McCain campaign released a statement in response to Obama’s criticism of the Arizona senator.
“Barack Obama’s health-care plan has a devastating impact on job creating small businesses and this is an obvious and crude effort to spackle together a quick political fix – but it lacks specifics, lacks funding and he lacks credibility,” said spokesman Tucker Bounds. “How can anyone honestly believe that Barack Obama will stick to his latest health-care proposal, when today he tried to abandon his last one, and showed once again that his policies are just words?”
Obama’s speech to the La Raza convention was much like the one he gave to LULAC last week and to NALEO last month. He talked about his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform and about the importance of the Latino vote.
“Make no mistake about it: The Latino community holds this election in its hands. You hold this election in your hands,” he said, noting the large Latino populations in crucial states like Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
Obama said he was not taking a single Latino vote for granted and that he had a nationwide Hispanic media strategy, was holding Latino voter registration drives across the country, and was meeting with Latino leaders and asking for input on his policy proposals from Latino organizations.
