Require businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
Make insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.
Create regional Health Markets purchasing pools to ensure that every American has a way to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.
Once these steps have been taken, require all American residents to get insurance.
Emphasis all mine, but notice the difference? Candidate Edwards says the word "insurance" exactly once: to attack a sick and parasitic industry which combines the worst aspects of Socialist Bureaucracy and Capitalist Profiteering, and is rightly loathed by virtually all Americans.
His plan, on the other hand, is all about making insurance affordable and creating new markets and choices for insurance. Oh, and also tax credits for insurance too.
I very much like the message of "doing stuff is better than waiting," and I suspect we're going to see a lot more of this internet-enabled "candidates getting up close and personal with individuals" over the next year. I'll be neat to watch this unfold. Kudos to Camp Edwards for an innovative campaign tactic that, whaddyaknow, actually does some good in the world too.
Adding: they seem to be the most intent of all the major campaigns on emulating the Dean model. DeanCorps (which this is clearly a copy of) was a pretty successful program in 2003-04. The major difference is that the Dean campaign didn't generate it from the top, but you have to start somewhere. It will be intriguing to see if the Edwards campaign is able to stimulate independent activism (probably can do), and then whether or not they'll be able to nurture, develop and scale it (much harder).
