It might take a village, and a $110 billion a year, but Senator Hillary Clinton, a little ``older and wiser’’, unveiled an ambitious health care plan on Monday that would require universal coverage, but unlike her 1994 tsunami, this new and improved voter friendly plan allows the freedom to choose individual plans, an important distinction the junior senator wanted to emphasize to bat down ``socialized medicine'' labels from opponents.
      Health care specialists, as you might have guessed, offered their own assessments , including Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, who considered it poisoned with a ``heavy dose of government control''.
      And while Mitt Romney was quick to bash Hillary Care as``bad medicine’’ the Boston Globe struggled distinguishing the Massachusetts solution from Clinton's proposal.
      Whether Hillary is a socialist, a ``modern progressive’’, a political genius, a crackpot, one of the above, two of the above, all of the above, or none of the above--one thing is for certain--our health care industry needs major surgery, as the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, when they reported ``workers on average pay $3,281 out of their paychecks to cover their share of the cost of a family policy'', while health care premiums shot up 6.1 percent in 2007.
      The U.S. Census Bureau also paints a grim tale, reporting the percentage without health insurance to have increased from 15.3 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2006, and the number of uninsured ballooned from 44.8 million to 47.0 million. 
      But for comparison shoppers, review what the former first lady had to say about health care in 1994 from 2007
-Bill Lucey
billlucey@bellsouth.net