Delaware Liberal

The Health Care debate between Jack Markell and John Carney started abit late on Friday morning — a good thing, since I was running really late. The auditorium was pretty much full (but not as many folks as at the Education debate), and this crowd was abit more sedate.

The News Journal has written this event up, so I won’t go over all of that ground, but it was interesting to me that Markell was abit more aggressive in this round. He started right out noting that Carney had served on health-care related commissions and task forces for almost a decade, but coverage of Delawareans continues to deteriorate, and costs continue to spiral upward. Markell set up his theme — that the health care situation in DE needed to be dealt with quickly and decisively, and that the era of incremental changes on the way to a larger goal was no longer a functional approach. Carney, then, spent the rest of the debate trying to tell the audience that his plan was not incremental steps — but he couldn’t avoid the step-by-step narrative that he’d already set up. In my opinion, Markell ended up looking like the guy ready to take some political risks to get to long-term solutions, and Carney was extending the work of his commissions and committees. Carney had the advantage, I think, of having many of his colleagues from some of these commissions and committees in the room.