PHILADELPHIA – Elizabeth Edwards said Tuesday she is discouraged by the prospect that health care is falling on the nation’s list of priorities and critiqued the plans of both leading presidential candidates.
In her first public talk since her husband, two-time Democratic presidential candidate and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, publicly admitted to an extramarital affair, Elizabeth Edwards confined her remarks to the subject of health coverage – an issue that forced itself into her own top priorities after a 2004 cancer diagnosis.
She said the financial crisis that has jostled Wall Street may demand national attention and money that would otherwise be invested in fixing the health care system.
“I’m more discouraged than I was before,” she said during a talk at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “Shame on us if we don’t take the momentum – even with all the other things that are happening – and translate it into a policy.”
Edwards said she sparred with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over his health care policy, which mandates insurance for children but doesn’t require coverage for adults. She said that just as people must pay into Social Security and be covered by driver’s insurance, health care coverage should be mandatory.
“It’s not just for your protection that you have insurance, it’s for the protection of everybody’s health care dollar,” Edwards said.
She said she had almost nothing good to say about the health care plan of Republican hopeful John McCain and argued that it would simply lower costs by forcing bare-bones policies.
“We don’t want health insurance, we want health care,” she said.
Continuing to push the health care agenda she helped write and promote for her husband’s campaign, Edwards said a government-run insurance plan should be an option for Americans. And she argued that the government could run the health industry cheaper and would eventually become the largest insurer in the nation.
She struck a deep populist tone by declaring that such an idea could one day lead toward some sort of single-payer system.
“I know that private health insurance companies work very hard to make us afraid of that kind of change,” she said. “If that were available … we would start to see the advantages of something closer to a single-payer model.”
Edwards showed no sign of dejection during the sold-out talk to a predominantly female crowd of 200. She joked and laughed and eagerly dug through layers of health care policy.
While encouraging the public to participate, a moderator also began the event by emphasizing that health care was the topic of the evening. Audience members asked no questions about her private life. Edwards didn’t come close to discussing the affair, was motionless when a questioner referred to Sen. Edwards as “our hero,” and declined to take questions from a reporter after the event.
Through her public bout with breast cancer, which disappeared after a long round of treatments but resurfaced in early 2007 in an incurable form, Edwards has become a respected speaker on health care policy. She blogs on the issue as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, although she hasn’t posted since the affair announcement. Obama has said he will partner with her on health care.
She won wide praise among women who were able to peer into the most wrenching moments of her life laid bare in a memoir released about the time her husband was having an affair. The book details how she coped with the death of her teenage son, Wade, and struggled through her cancer diagnosis just after the 2004 election in which her husband was a vice presidential candidate with Sen. John Kerry.
But she’s been quiet about her latest hardship, only discussing the infidelity in a brief statement last month in which she pleaded for privacy and said that her husband had disclosed the liaison in 2006.
That statement set off a round of criticism aimed at her, as Democrats questioned why a leader of the progressive movement would jeopardize the cause by allowing her husband to continue his march to the White House while carrying such a dark secret.
John Edwards has canceled all of his public events until after the election, saying in a statement through his publicist he doesn’t want to be a distraction to his party’s ticket.
He admitted in early August that he had an affair with a woman hired to produce videos of him in 2006. She remained on the campaign trail during the opening days of his presidential bid at the end of that year.
