JK premieres a new ad called "Paperwork" today highlighting his plan to reduce health care costs for every American.  It's a great spot of the "I'm a serious guy who's trying to solve serious problems" variety, hence I love it.

One of the things I like most about the spot is that it tells voters to go to johnkerry.com to read his whole plan for making health care more affordable.  The website doesn't do a fantastic job of highlighting the plan, but you can download it here.

On the whole, it's full of pretty good ideas.  We can nitpick specific points, but JK gets huge props just for having a plan and telling voters to read it.  That's called running on ideas, boys and girls.  We could use a lot more of that around here.

Kerry's plan has three key points.

1. Make Health Insurance Cheaper
   
   Everyone likes to talk about healthy kids and the uninsured (see points 2 and 3), but the truth is that virtually everyone is affected by the skyrocketing costs of health care and health insurance.  All those folks who pay out the nose for prescription drugs vote and Kerry is smart to address their concerns first.
   
   The plan is simple:
   
   
   • Provide federal assistance for the most expensive 0.04% of cases that make up 20% of medical expenses for private insurers.
   
   
   • Lower the costs of perscription drugs by allowing the feds to negotiate bulk discounts.
   
   
   • Invest in technology that will cut costs and reduce medical errors.
   
   
   • Limit malpractice insurance costs by implementing new controls on lawsuits, but not by enacting damage caps which only affect those cases where malpractice is actually proven.
   
   
2. Cover Every Kid
   
   This part of the plan is pretty similar to whan Dean did in Vermont and formed the centerpiece of his health care plan.  It's been proven to work in the states and can work on the federal level.  The Kerry plan would provide federal assistance to cover every child whose family earns less than 300% of the poverty level.
   
   
3. Cover the Uninsured
   
   Kerry would allow every business to buy into the federal health plan in order to provide more affordable choices to their employees.  Remember, expanding the size of the federal insurance program would, under Kerry, allow it to negotiate ever bigger bulk discounts.
   
   Workers between jobs and others without health insurance would qualify for big tax credits to make health care affordable even in tough times.
   

That, my friends, is a damn good plan.  It probably wouldn't solve every problem when it comes to health care, but it tries to address the basic tension that exists in our system.  No one should get something for nothing in our free market society, but no one deserves to die just because they can't afford adequate health care in the richest nation on Earth.  This JK character looks less and less like a douchebag every day.