Obama's Health-Care Flier

The Obama campaign is trying to shift the focus to some unspecified "punishment" that Clinton's plan would mete out for those who didn't obtain coverage. It's true that a "mandate" implies penalties for noncompliance, and Clinton's campaign has yet to outline what those would be. But Obama's plan, which would mandate coverage for children, would presumably also have some enforcement mechanism, and he doesn't make explicit what that would be, either, at least as his plan is laid out on his Web site.

"Harry and Louise"
According to news reports, the Clinton campaign lashed out at the use of the mailer in a conference call with selected reporters, complaining that the mail piece bears a resemblance to the "Harry and Louise" TV spots of 1993 and 1994 (pictured here).

One person on the call emotionally said the Obama mail piece was "outrageous as having Nazis march through Skokie, Illinois." That outburst was quickly disavowed during the call by Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, who said it is "not a comparison that [the campaign] would make." The unpaid health care adviser who made the remark, Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, later apologized. He sent an e-mail to reporters saying, "My passions overwhelmed me. I chose an analogy that was wholly inappropriate."

We agree that there is a resemblance between the photo on the Obama mailer and the TV spots. In those ads actors portraying a white, middle-class couple expressed grave concerns about how the Clinton administration's health care plan would affect them. The ads were part of a $17 million campaign by the insurance industry that was widely credited – rightly or wrongly – with contributing to the defeat of the Clinton plan, and the ads still anger many advocates of broader government efforts to provide health insurance. But so far as we can see, Obama's choice of images in his mailer has nothing whatever to do with the accuracy of the claims it makes, or the accuracy of what "Harry and Louise" said, for that matter.

Republished with permission from factcheck.org

Sources
Obama, Barack. "Plan for a Healthy America," 29 May 2007.
Clinton, Hillary. "American Health Choices Plan," 17 Sept. 2007.
Blumenthal, David and David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman. "Final Costs Memo," 29 May 2007.
"Caucus 2008: Our Endorsements." Editorial. The Daily Iowan, 21 Dec. 2007.
Thrush, Glenn. "Clinton adviser apologizes for remarks on Obama ad." Newsday, 2 Feb. 2008.
Scarlett, Thomas. "Killing health care reform." Campaigns & Elections, Oct-Nov 1994.

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