Issues: Obama turns the campaign focus to Health Care

Doing his share to support the increase in negativity in the McCain campaign,Tucker Bounds, John McCain's cherubic-faced campaign spokesman, called Barack Obama a "bald-faced liar" for saying that McCain's health care plan amounts to a "bait-and-switch" on taxpayers.

For his part, Obama had this to say about health care at a rally in Newport News, Virginia:

"I reject the tired old debate that says we have to choose between two extremes: government-run health care with higher taxes . .. or insurance companies without rules, denying people coverage," Obama said here. "That's a false choice. It's the same distracting rhetoric that's kept us gridlocked for decades."

THIS is the Obama I admire. The man that speaks directly to people - the candidate that says YES, there is a different way of doing things, a different way of looking at things; yes, we can make this work.

UPDATE: Read Paul Krugman's OpEd piece in the NY Times today (10/06/2008). He compares McCain and Obama's health plans. Krugman accepts the valuation of the average family health care plan as $12,000, and says that the people who will gain the most from McCain's plan are upper income, healthy people, the ones who need relief the least. Krugman says,

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”
I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.