HFMA VIEWS

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s final election poll, featured in HFMA’s “In the News” earlier this week, finds the cost of health care at the top of the list of economic concerns for many Americans. But as Election Day draws near, the candidates’ proposals on healthcare reform--and the feasibility of either candidate’s plan--have come under increasing scrutiny.

Kevin Sack, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote this week that despite the fact that both Barack Obama and John McCain are “filling their speeches, advertisements and debating points with authoritative-sounding statistics about the money they would save and the millions of Americans they would cover,” those statistics are at best “the roughest of estimates” and have “become so disparate and contradictory as to be almost meaningless.”

Meanwhile, a post on the The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog noted that although both candidates are proposing big changes to the health insurance system, “nobody knows exactly how those changes would play out in the real world.”

Complicating matters further, of course, is the vast amount of federal funds that have been committed to the economic bailout effort. But as the Kaiser election poll suggests, health care too is a looming crisis for the nation, and the political pressures for change are likely only to intensify as economic conditions deteriorate.

Despite the fuzzy math that has characterized cost and saving projections of the two candidates’ plans during the campaign, there are significant and concrete differences in their approaches to healthcare reform. The Commonwealth Fund has provided a useful interactive chart that allows point-by-point comparison of these plans across a range of issues.

What are your views on the candidates’ healthcare plans? Weigh in by posting a comment below. Just click on the “Comments” link and let us know your thoughts.