Health Care

Barack Obama should be more explicit about how he wants people to pay for health insurance under his plan—but don't hold your breath for more details.

That's the opinion of Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped to develop the health care plans of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Gruber said that after Clinton's proposal to cap health insurance premiums at 5 percent to 10 percent of income, the onus has moved to Obama to detail how much he thinks Americans should pay for health insurance.

"I think it helps if they both have real numbers," said Gruber. "I think having one person having a number doesn't help that much, because then you can't really compare."

When asked if the onus was now on Obama to detail how Americans would pay for insurance, Gruber said "Yeah I think so." But when asked if he thought the Obama campaign would actually provide that number, he was doubtful. "No," he said. "They're the front-runners. Front-runners don't produce numbers."  read more »

At a press conference this morning at his Clinton Global Initiative conference, Bill Clinton said that he and Hillary Clinton's inability to pass health care reform was not a total failure.

He also said that he would disclose any new contributions to his library if Hillary was elected president.  read more »

Hillary Clinton dressed in New York black for her return home--or at least to Manhattan--for a low-dollar fund-raiser at the Town Hall theater off Times Square last night. "Wow, it's great to be in New York, it's wonderful to be home," she said after striding onto the stage.

She used the appearance to promote her newly unveiled health care plan, and talk again about the lessons she learned from her first, disastrous effort.

"I've thought about this for a long time," she said, adding that she had "replayed the video" of the 1993 and 1994 process over and over in her head. She wasn't exactly apologetic about the first try, saying that universal coverage "always seemed fair to me. I recommended it back in '93 and '94."

It was, for the most part, more of the same. She said the new plan, unlike the first, would not require any new bureaucracy, but acknowledged "we might have to hire some more people because we'll have more people in the system." That would be offset, she suggested, by a plan that was "going to save money for businesses and individuals."

More after the jump.  read more »