In less than a year, we will have a new president. How will our new president affect your health and the health of your family and friends?

The Democratic and Republican candidates all support big improvements in health care to keep costs down and help more people have better health care. They all agree that healthcare and health insurance cost too much and that changes are needed. This is not a liberal or conservative issue: even the most conservative candidate, Mike Huckabee, calls for a "complete overhaul."

We have created a chart describing what each candidate supports and doesn't support, based on information on each of their web sites. There are some similarities: For example, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both support expanding the health insurance program that is currently available to Members of Congress and other federal workers, to make it available to everyone. This is not a government health care program -- it just makes the choice of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, and many other private health insurance policies much more affordable. Both these candidates would offer this as an option to all Americans, to reduce the costs of health insurance. The main difference is that Obama would require every child under 18 to have health insurance and Clinton would also require every adult to have health insurance.

Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all oppose the idea that the health insurance policies available to Congress and federal workers should be expanded to make them available to all adults and children. All 3 candidates believe that insurance companies and private companies that buy health insurance for their employees should be responsible for better health care, or the state governments, but not the federal government. All believe that innovative changes will reduce costs, although McCain also supports changes in federal policies that will help make that happen.

The devil is in the details. For example, all the candidates want health insurance to be more affordable, but they don't define affordable.

Should all adults be required to have health insurance? Should you care that millions of Americans don't have health insurance? You might be suprised to learn that you help pay for expensive health care for people who are uninsured, because the costs of their care are shared by others using the same doctors or hospitals. For example, Mitt Romney says on this web site: "Stop The Free-Riders. Use some of the money currently spent on providing expensive "free care" for the uninsured at emergency rooms to instead help the truly needy buy private insurance."

All the candidates agree that this is one way to spend healthcare dollars more efficiently. However, the only way to prevent the exorbitant cost of "free care" for the uninsured from being passed on to everyone is to either not provide medical care to anyone without insurance or to require every American to have health insurance. If health insurance is optional -- even if it is affordable -- there will always be some people who will choose to spend their money on other things, and if they have a major illness, everyone will probably end up helping pay for their care. And yet, none of the candidates suggest that we should let people die if they don't have insurance, and Hillary Clinton is the only candidate whose plan requires that all Americans will have health insurance (in much the same way that most states require everyone who drives to have car insurance.)

If it were easy to improve health care and lower the costs, we would have solved the problem already. It's complicated, but all the candidates agree that healthcare and health insurance need to be more affordable. The 3 Republicans would leave it up to each State to decide, but they also emphasize that companies are the key to improving the system, not the government. The Democrats' plans are more specific because you can learn about the Congressional health insurance plan to give you some idea of whether that would benefit you. (See http://www.opm.gov/insure/08/spmt/plansearch.aspx). And under one proposal -- Hillary Clinton's -- all Americans would have health insurance.

The National Research Center for Women & Families applauds all the candidates' interest in making healtcare more affordable. Of the 2 Democrats' plans, we prefer Hillary Clinton's because it would provide healthcare for all adults and children. Of the Republicans' plans, we are impressed with John McCain's comprehensive approach to improving health care (as described on his web site), but less impressed with the specifics of his plan.

Democrats