Mike Huckabee says GOP should focus more on health care in Presidential election

Sep 4 2008

Former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Tuesday during a forum about obesity expressed disappointment that the party has not focused more on health care in the presidential election, The Hill reports.

According to Huckabee, "speech gurus" at the Republican National Convention recommended that he remove language about health care from his planned convention speech. However, Huckabee also pointed out "that time constraints restricted his speech to about half the size of his draft," according to The Hill.

In addition, Huckabee criticized the other former Republican presidential candidates for their failure to participate in a health care forum in Iowa during the primaries. Only Huckabee and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) participated in the forum, sponsored by AARP. Huckabee also praised AARP and the Service Employees International Union for their efforts to promote health care in the presidential election.

Huckabee said, "I wish I could get some attention for this. I tried on the campaign trail. I desperately tried." He added, "In the first nine debates we had, do you know how many health care questions we had? For Republicans, in the first nine debates: one. One."

The "issue of health care, particularly achieving universal health care, has been paramount on the Democratic side during the presidential contest but has rarely cropped up on the GOP side," according to The Hill (Blake, The Hill, 9/2).

Opinion Pieces

The Wall Street Journal recently published two opinion pieces related to health care issues in the presidential election. Summaries appear below.

• Al Hubbard/Noam Neusner: Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) has not experienced a large increase in support after the Democratic National Convention because "voters are paying attention" to his proposals on health and other issues and "appear not to like what Candidate Obama is saying," Hubbard, former director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president from 2005 to 2007, and Neusner, presidential economic policy speechwriter from 2002 to 2004, write in a Journal opinion piece. They continue that, although the Obama health care proposal "is not quite HillaryCare ... it comes close." Under the proposal, a "national health insurance, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, would be offered to the currently uninsured," the authors write, adding, "Mr. Obama's instincts on health care are always to move more people onto rolls of government-paid and government-mandated insurance, while depriving the marketplace the oxygen it needs for greater innovation, life-saving cures and efficiency." According to the authors, "Americans have heard the refrain for government-provided health care before and know an expensive government giveaway when they see it." The "economic wisdom of Americans should not be doubted" as they "know a centralized government-controlled health care system will be more expensive, less efficient, and less friendly to patients and doctors," according to the authors. They conclude, "Mr. Obama is wondering why he can't shake Mr. McCain. His problem isn't his plans for the campaign. It's his plans for governing the country. Americans just aren't buying into them" (Hubbard/Neusner, Wall Street Journal, 9/3).
• Martin Feldstein/John Taylor: McCain has proposed an overall tax policy that, among other benefits, would expand access to health insurance and make the health care system more efficient, Feldstein and Taylor -- economic advisers to McCain and professors of economics at Harvard University and Stanford University, respectively -- write in a Journal opinion piece. According to the authors, McCain would replace a tax break for employees who receive health insurance from employers with a refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families for the purchase of a "qualifying health care policy" through their employers or the individual coverage market. They add, "This tax credit will be available to everyone, including the self-employed and the employees of businesses that do not provide health insurance," which "will lead to a major expansion of health insurance coverage." In addition, the authors write, the "tax credit will be a clear gain for most employees" because "the lower the taxpayer's income, the more of the credit that will be available to pay for health care that's not reimbursed by insurance." The authors also maintain that "Obama was at best disingenuous in his convention speech when he criticized the McCain plan for taxing health benefits," as the tax credit proposed by McCain "exceeds the extra taxes on existing benefits." Obama also "criticized Mr. McCain on the grounds that he doesn't cut taxes on 100 million families," but "this ignores the fact that Mr. McCain's health insurance credits would benefit most taxpayers and that many people who are not currently eligible for the increased personal exemption will become eligible when they have children," according to the authors. They add, "When these features are taken into account, the vast majority of today's 140 million taxpayers would pay lower taxes under the McCain plan" (Feldstein/Taylor, Wall Street Journal, 9/2).