I recently had a hand in a project, called the Healthcare08 PoliGraph, which seeks to find meaningful distinctions among the presidential candidates' healthcare policies. This was tougher than it sounds.
This being the primary season, each party's contenders are pretty much sticking with the approved script. The Democrats are trying to outbid each other for cradle-to-grave healthcare for all humans treading on U.S. soil. The Republicans are quietly uttering free-market shibboleths to avoid alienating their big contributors until the fall, when they'll probably have to promise to do something or other.
The project plotted each candidate's stances on six healthcare issues on big interactive graphics. We plotted their positions along two axes: from left (i.e., federalphilic) to right (federalphobic), and from most important to least important (to the candidate, not us).
By parsing the data carefully, we were able to find some daylight between candidates, even within each party's tight ideological clusters.
For instance, for all the fuss over comparing Clinton's and Edwards's personal "mandates" that people have insurance, when we dug into her plan we found her solutions more inclusive of market forces than either Edwards' or Obama's. (This gets wonkish, but Hillary gives small businesses incentives to offer private insurance coverage to employees; Edwards and Obama depend more on mandates and expanding public programs to fill that gap. Hey, it's something.)
But the most interesting thing that showed up when we got done plotting everybody jumped out in plain red and blue. Several Republicans held positions in the blue zone on some healthcare issues. Not so for Democrats. For instance:
* John McCain is code blue drug prices, his position is essentially no different from the Edwards/Clinton/Obama scrum: Let Medicare bargain with big pharma over drugs prices, permit drug imports from other countries and support development of generic drugs. He doesn't veer as far left as those who want to regulate drug company sales practices (Edwards), but he's solid blue.
* Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are tap-dancing quietly in the blue zone on stem cells. Romney says it's okay to use stem cells left over from IVF treatments for medical research, but doesn't want federal dollars to fund it. Giuliani generally supports the use of embryonic stem cell research and is even sanguine with federal funding. But they are both keeping awfully quiet about it. At least until the general election.
Of course, life being complicated and politics being political, some folks were really hard to pin down on a simple left-to-right axis. Ron Paul is against federal funding for stem cell research but does not object to the practice itself. Is that "left" or "right"? (As is often the case with libertarians, maybe it's neither and both and har-de-har!)
And Democrat Mike Gravel's views are, how do you say, all over the graph. Is his a-health-insurance-voucher-in-every-pot plan a pinky ploy to go Canadian? Or is it a way to pump federal dollars directly into the pockets of private insurers, and stealthily destroy Medicare and Medicaid?
Luckily, since it's Gravel's idea, we're highly unlikely to find out.
We've decided to continue to plot the changes in the candidates' views on healthcare issues all the way through November, when of course there will be only two candidates remaining (give or take a Bloomberg).
What do you bet they'll wind up awfully close to the middle of the graph?