In 100 words or fewer, what is the Obama health plan?

100 words or fewer, describe the Obama plan:

The Obama/Biden health plan’s most substantial components are (1) a commitment to saving “the typical family” up to $2,500 per year in health insurance premiums by making the health care system more efficient, (2) subsidies to ensure that health insurance is affordable, (3) a requirement for employers to buy coverage for their workers or pay a payroll tax (4) a new national health plan that will set a floor for what health insurance can be (5 ) a new mechanism to buy insurance called a “national health insurance exchange” and (6) a mandate that parents obtain health insurance for their children.

There, that’s it in 100 words. Got a different 100 words? Post them in the comments.

My ordering is based on (1) dollars moved around, (2) people moved around and (3) degree of policy change. If I could have a few more words, I would next add the proposal for the government to provide catastrophic health insurance to those in employer health plans. Depending on what’s counted as “catastrophic,” this has the potential to wind up higher in the “most substantial” list. Then comes “expansion of Medicaid and SCHIP.” Expand Medicaid and SCHIP enough and it could move up. Policy novelty? None. It both cases, the lack of detail in the Obama plan makes it anyone’s guess what is truly most substantial.

Note that the prevention and public health agenda isn’t here. If you read the Obama source documents (see yesterday’s post) and relied only on word counts as the measure of importance, prevention/public health would make it into the “100 words or less” description. However, when weighting by dollars at stake, prevention and public health don’t make it. Yes, “many Americans go without high-value preventive services, such as cancer screening and immunizations,” as it says in Barack Obama’s Plan for a Healthy America but we don’t learn there what an Obama Administration would do about it. When the rhetoric is descriptive rather than prescriptive, in contrast to the clear promise of $2,500 in premium savings or employer mandates, its hard to put prevention and public health higher in the rankings.