They've Got You Covered?

Also, about 7 percent of those who have access to employer-sponsored (and subsidized) health insurance don't take it, according to Gruber's research. (It's possible some may still find the employee contribution for premiums to be too expensive.)

Savings and Costs
Aside from the mandate, the candidates' plans are similar. They differ in details, but both propose to lower health care spending and individual costs through increased efficiency and reduced administrative costs, and both will offer an array of insurance options, including a public plan. Both will expand or revise Medicaid and SCHIP, and both will require insurance companies to provide guaranteed coverage to all. Here's our comparison of key points:

Comparision of health care plans
Clinton says that her plan would save $2,200 for the average family. Obama's campaign requested an analysis from three Harvard professors, who estimated an average savings of $2,500. Both intend to achieve these savings primarily through increased efficiency – electronic medical records and a focus on preventive care are paramount – and curbing incidental administrative expenditures like underwriting and prescription costs.

But economics experts aren't buying it. Sheils calls these estimates "nonsense." "Your average family's spending," he tells FactCheck, "should be around $4,500 out of pocket on their premiums and expenditures; $2,500 would be over 50 percent of that. ... It's just outrageous that you could claim you'd knock 50 percent right off the top." Sheils points out that preventive care and electronic medical records, two sources of such savings, are already major projects: "All you could do is accelerate it, and you can't credit the presidential candidate for all of the savings that come from something that would've happened anyway." He acknowledges that other proposed efficiency innovations, like improved clinical effectiveness research – determining the relative usefulness of various treatments – could have an impact on costs, but warns that new guidelines would encounter resistance from doctors and require serious policy overhauls.

Gruber is also skeptical of the claimed "savings." He praised both candidates for their intentions but believes that "at the end of the day, the only way to control health care costs in America is to deny Americans health care they want. ... I think the notion that we're going to save $2,000 per person in America for most things, I know zero credible evidence to support that conclusion," he says. "Basically, we just don't know. We just have no clue what it's going to do."

To be sure, not all are so skeptical. Kenneth E. Thorpe, professor of health policy at Emory University, says that both candidates' overall savings estimates are "reasonable." In addition to the savings for individual premiums, both campaigns estimate that their plans will save $110 billion to $200 billion per year in health care spending. "It sounds like a big number, but they're really not that big," Thorpe told us, pointing out that total health care spending in the U.S. is $2.2 trillion a year. Obama's and Clinton's estimates are about 5 percent to 10 percent of that.