Nation's Health Care System on Radar this for Hillary Clinton
COLLINS: The nation's health care system on the radar this hour for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. CNN's Candy Crowley part of the best political team coverage on television. She's joining us now from Des Moines, Iowa. Hi there, Candy.</s>CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: How are you, Heidi? Listen, this is actually Hillary Clinton's third leg of her plan. It deals with the uninsured. So what she will propose is similar to what other candidates have proposed. First, a mandate that everybody have health insurance, federal subsidies to help those in a lower income who can't afford those premiums and some restrictions on health care insurance companies. For instance, under the Clinton plan, insurance companies must insure anyone who applies and they cannot charge sick people more than they charge healthy people for those premiums. So those are sort of the mainstays of this particular Clinton plan.</s>COLLINS: Ok. Candy, sorry, I have a little bit of trouble hearing you here. Obviously this is not the first time that Hillary Clinton has proposed some of these ideas. I'm sure people are wondering what is flagrantly different this time around.</s>CROWLEY: Well, first of all, Hillary Clinton spends a lot of time on the campaign trail. Okay, I learned a lot from 1993, 1994 when President Clinton put her in charge of coming up with a health care plan. One of the things she learned is that everyone pretty much has to be in the table, has to be on board. Otherwise you do get strong special interest groups, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, coming up against your plan. This is a very carefully laid-out plan taking in mind some of those interests. There is not, for instance, last time around Hillary Clinton said that -- put a cap on what premiums could be at insurance companies. That's not there anymore, although she would have some rule, some exclusivity here for insurance companies to have to accept anyone that wants insurance and to charge sick people the same way they charge healthy people. But there is no cap on what they can charge for those premiums so there is some drawing back from what was seen as this big bureaucratic mess that she proposed before, and much more relying on the existing system from which to build rather than just throwing out the old system and putting in a new one.</s>COLLINS: Candy, can you get a sense of whether people will understand this better? I mean the average American, the average consumer?</s>CROWLEY: Look, it's tough. I mean if you look across the board at Barack Obama or John Edwards or Hillary Clinton, there is a lot more similarities than there are differences to their plans. But I think when you say to people, look, under the Clinton plan or the Edwards plan, or the Edwards plan or for that matter, the Obama plan, insurance companies could not discriminate on the basis of health or have to accept you. If you want health insurance from them, I think people understand that, because those are day-to-day problems that they have. But I think they understand that low-income people can't afford health insurance, so putting out federal subsidies would help put them into the pool. So I think there are sort of broad things that people out there really can relate to.</s>COLLINS: Will there be people who will say this is socialism?</s>CROWLEY: Well, you know certainly I think you will hear the conservatives come out and say this is getting the government into health care, we ought to let the private sector deal with this. Any time you mandate something, conservatives tend not to like it. So all three of these plans in some way or form would put further restrictions and mandates on the health care system, pharmaceuticals, as well as health insurance companies. So, that's always something that conservatives tend to attack. I suspect since Hillary Clinton has this history with health care -- in fact we're already seeing the Republican National Committee come out and talk about Hillary-care as they used to derisively call it, so this is a huge battle between how far people want to go and getting the federal government involved. Of course, the Clinton campaign points out that we are in a very different place in 2007 than she was in 2003 and '04. There are more uninsured, people are more fed up by the health care system. They think the time is right for this sort of proposal.</s>COLLINS: All right, CNN's Candy Crowley, watching the story for us out of Des Moines, Iowa. Candy, thank you for that. 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