f he does nothing else during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Bradley has done a great service to the 43 million Americans who lack health insurance. His plan for tax deductions and subsidies to cover all uninsured people puts the issue back on the national agenda.
Most Americans regard medical care as a right, as demonstrated by the furor when Massachusetts declined to pay the cost of a boy's experimental leukemia treatment. As the House majority leader, Richard Armey of Texas, said in an article in The Washington Post, ''The biggest health problem in the country is the uninsured.''
Ever since the Clinton health plan failed in 1994, no politician has vigorously pushed a plan to offer insurance coverage to all Americans. The only advance since then came when Senator Kennedy led a bipartisan effort to provide wider coverage for children. Vice President Al Gore, in his initial campaign statement on health care, barely goes beyond that, promising to cover more youngsters and to provide limited tax credits so adults can buy insurance.
Bradley, while acknowledging that his plan is a work in progress, forthrightly puts a price tag of $55 billion to $65 billion on a solution. He would expand coverage for children by adding them to the federal employees' health program and offering adults similar coverage on a sliding scale depending on income. All payments for health insurance would be tax-deductible.
Armey prefers a tax credit in which the government would pay insurers to cover low-income Americans. It is unclear how close his position is to Bradley's. Yet Bradley made sure that his plan offended no powerful group, at least immediately. This in contrast to the Clinton plan, which insurance companies thought would threaten their business. Bradley and Armey would provide them with more customers, and neither would disrupt the coverage of Americans in company health plans.
Gore and the GOP candidates for president shouldn't be shy in putting out their own proposals. As shown by Armey's piece in The Washington Post, which he wrote with Democrat Pete Stark of California, this issue has bipartisan appeal.
