Clinton misstates Obama's stance on healthcare

Senator Hillary Clinton visited with workers yesterday at a Bob Evans Restaurant in Rio Grande, Ohio. (carolyn kaster/Associated Press)

HANGING ROCK, Ohio - Senator Hillary Clinton, who has accused rival Barack Obama of sending misleading mailers to voters about her healthcare plan, misstated his healthcare views before an audience yesterday in rural Ohio.

Clinton, speaking on poverty and family wellness at a community center, told a couple hundred people that she was committed to universal healthcare because families cannot be fully healthy unless every member of the family is.

"If you don't have health insurance for everyone, we're never going to get out of this," she said. "We're just going to keep running around in circles."

This, Clinton said, was one of the big differences between her and Obama. "I want . . . each and every member of the family to have health insurance. My opponent only wants your children to have health insurance," she said. "I don't think that's smart."

The main difference in their healthcare proposals is this: Clinton would require that everyone purchase insurance, a mandate she says she would impose in tandem with bringing costs down through subsidies and other measures. Obama would impose such a mandate only on parents, requiring them to cover their children.

Clinton argues that Obama would leave 15 million people uncovered by not extending his mandate to adults.

Obama, though, has made healthcare a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, and he, too, has proposed a detailed plan to cover the uninsured, pledging to have affordable coverage available for all Americans by the end of his first term as president.

Asked yesterday about her suggestion that Obama wanted to provide health coverage to children but not adults, Clinton stood by what she said was a "fair" distinction.

"Look at his plan," she told reporters. "He has a mandate to cover children. He does not have any requirement for adults. He has said repeatedly that he is concerned about children. Well, I cover both children and adults, and I wanted to make the case today because I know this, having done this for so many years, that you can give your children health insurance, but if the mother or the father who's the breadwinner can't get health insurance, gets sick, can't go to work, the whole family suffers."

"The bottom line," she added, "is he was not willing to go the distance with a universal healthcare plan. . . . I was drawing that distinction, and I think it's a fair one."

Clinton's message in Hanging Rock, a small community on the Ohio River in the southeastern corner of the state, was that she will not forget poor and rural Americans if she wins the White House, a case she has been making consistently in the run-up to Ohio's crucial primary Tuesday.

The Iraq war and other national security concerns are important, Clinton said, but so are "the issues that get you up in the morning or keep you up late at night worrying."

"How are you going to make ends meet?" she said. "What is going to happen if you can't afford to send that son or daughter to college. What about those mortgage payments?"

Clinton brought two struggling mothers up on stage and asked them to share their stories with the crowd. Their struggles and sentiments, as well as those of other participants in the town hall event, are familiar here in the foothills of Appalachia: Healthcare is too expensive, wages are difficult to live on, and the government is not doing enough to help people get by.

One woman broke down in tears as she told Clinton her tale: a lost job, no health insurance, huge medical debt, two children, trying to go back to school, bureaucratic nightmares with the government over taxes and unemployment payments.

"It's like you're stuck in that same rut, and it's like the government is penalizing you for trying to better yourself," she said. "I mean, at least give my kids health insurance."

Clinton, listening with empathy, said: "I am so sorry that this is all coming down on you at once. That's a lot to deal with."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.