An East Carolina University medical student says she believes the health care plan of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would be best to address the country's needs.

As part of an individual health policy elective, Ginny Stewart recently analyzed the health care proposals of Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain. Stewart said Clinton's plan offers the best solutions for providing health care coverage to 47 million uninsured Americans and cutting health care expenses.

"I think every physician has a responsibility to have some level of awareness of health policy issues that affect their practice and their patients," Stewart said. "After four years of medical school, I realized this was an area I was deficient in so I designed an individual elective this month with health policy.

"I looked at the three campaigns and I was really undecided. But because health care is one of my biggest issues in this election, agreeing with Sen. Clinton's campaign kind of pushed me towards her."

Stewart, 30, said many of the patients she sees each day do not have health insurance, and she believes many of the chronic health conditions they face could have been prevented if they had health insurance and health care earlier in life.

Clinton's plan is similar to Obama's in many ways, Stewart says, but her proposal would require health care coverage for all Americans while Obama mandates it only for children. Under Clinton's plan, people can keep their current plan or, if uninsured, they can choose a plan from choices Congress receives under the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program. In addition to the private options, Clinton's plan says Americans can choose a public plan similar to Medicare, Stewart said.

"I think Sen. Clinton's plan would be the most effective because it is the most comprehensive," Stewart said. "I think to lower health care costs and insurance premiums, everyone is going to have to be insured. We are living in a country where everyone is required to have auto insurance, but not necessarily health insurance.

"I believe that health is a human right. In order to extend that right for everyone to have health care, they should have some sort of health insurance or coverage."

McCain's plan does not provide comprehensive coverage, and would be the least effective of the three proposals, Stewart said, adding that American is one of the few industrialized nations that doesn't have comprehensive health care coverage.

Stewart said she also was fond of Clinton's strategies for getting businesses to provide health insurance. The plan would provide tax credits to small businesses that provide health care to defray the cost of coverage, and large businesses would be mandated to provide health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage.

Clinton's plan would also lower national health spending by $120 billion annually, Stewart said, by creating initiatives to reduce diseases, using paperless health information technology, ending insurance discrimination and implementing smart purchasing initiatives to constrain excess prescription drug and managed care expenditures.

Clinton's proposals for strengthening Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides money for children's health care coverage, also appeal to Stewart.

Stewart says none of the candidates' health care plans will come to fruition if something isn't done to address the economy, however.

"Sen. Clinton has the most conservative economic views of the three candidates," Stewart said. "She has a plan to straighten out our economy, and that is important too. If we can't do that, it doesn't matter what type of health care plans we have."