Two Ways To Achieve Universal Health Care

Neither Obama nor Clinton want Americans -- children especially -- to be without health coverage. This is why they both plan to implement universal health care if elected president.

Their plans to achieve universal coverage are 95% similar but their methods of achieving the "universal" part vary.

Think of their differences as you would with parenting:

While Clinton's method utilizes tough love by way of mandates, Obama's takes a more laissez fare approach.

Clinton's plan uses mandates to cover every American. This means that even though both she and Obama plan on lowering health care rates, people are required to purchase coverage. This may mean garnishing wages or handing out penalties to those who do not cooperate.

Obama's plan relies more on the lowering of rates to entice Americans to purchase health care.

New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman writes a great piece on why he prefers the Clinton, utilizing a recent study --

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

The breakdown says that Americans will not necessarily purchase the plan even if the rates are lowered. So does this justify an across-the-board penalty system for not purchasing a health care plan? Should we spare the rod en route to covering all Americans?

This is where Americans' ideals cause them to support one plan or the other. Neither plan is necessarily right or wrong, but they tap into a belief system and ruling method that may or may not be acceptable to voters.

As she campaigned in Ohio, Clinton chastised Obama for sending out two mailers; the first pointed to conflicting Clinton positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- her husband, former president Bill Clinton, supported NAFTA whole-heartedly while in office, as did she, and now she is complaining of how much she dislikes it; the other mailer implied the force Clinton's universal health care plan would use to insure all Americans.

Clinton accused Obama of using "tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's playbook of dirty tactics."

The Yahoo! News story has the more detailed back-and-forth, including Obama's response --

Obama defended the mailings as accurate and rejected Clinton's complaint as a political ploy. He said that despite her current criticism of NAFTA, she supported the trade agreement when it passed during her husband's administration.

"You can't be for something and take credit for an administration ... and then when you run for president say that you didn't really mean what you said way back then. It doesn't work like that," he said to cheers at a rally in Akron.