Campaign Health Advisors Square Off

The presidential candidates’ senior health advisors fielded questions on insurance, subsidies, and contraceptives in a debate titled “Women’s Health: McCain and Obama” last night.

The discussion explained health care needs specific to women, highlighting differences between the plans of the Republican nominee, John McCain, and his Democratic rival, Barack Obama.

“Women are uniquely vulnerable,” said the event’s moderator, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Sheila Burke, in an interview before the discussion began. “We ought to be paying attention to these issues and there are real differences between the candidates’ policies and how they will affect women.”

Alina Salganicoff, vice president and director of women’s health policy for the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation, started the discussion by citing the statistic that 18 percent of women in America are uninsured. She attributed this number to women’s role as caregivers or part-time workers rather than breadwinners in their family, resulting in their inability to purchase health care policies of their own.

The discussion then turned to the current presidential race, and senior health advisors from both campaigns provided an overview of their candidates’ plans.

McCain campaign advisor Gail R. Wilensky presented her candidate’s proposal to provide tax credits of $5,000 per family or $2,500 for an individual, as well as a “Guaranteed Access Plan” for those people who cannot receive coverage due to conditions such as chronic illnesses.

“Everyone will have the access to financial support to buy a health insurance plan that meets their needs,” Wilensky said in an interview following the event. “That’s a very different world than what we have now.”

David Blumenthal, Obama’s senior health advisor, invoked the Democratic candidate’s assertion during the third presidential debate that “health care is a right, not a responsibility.” Blumenthal said that Obama’s proposal would create a government-subsidized plan for low-income families similar to the health care benefits given to federal employees.

“The goal is to make sure everyone has high-quality insurance,” said Blumenthal of Obama’s goal of universal coverage and affordable care. Blumenthal is also a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

One audience member, Madina Agenor, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health, said that Wilensky and Blumenthal provided good overviews and contrasts between the candidates’ health care plans. But she said she regretted that they had not gone into “more specifics about how [the candidates] would concretely achieve their goals.”

Agenor also said she’d hoped the health care advisors would discuss America’s racial and socioeconomic health disparities. Salganicoff’s opening slides placed an emphasis on the underserved, while the debate did not address similar issues of health and equality, Agenor said.