Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan has gotten as much attention as anything in this election.

Her past, of course, is the reason. Who has forgotten her first stab at univeral health care and the disaster that was?

Her new plan is nowhere near as ambitious as the one she tried 14 years ago but it calls for universal health care. Everyone would be required to have health care, and to buy it if necessary. Federal assistance would help with the costs.

What’s striking is how much things have changed since Clinton first took on health care. More people are uninsured. Massachusetts enacted a law last year that required all adults to buy some kind of insurance by this past July or face a fine. Then Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, now a presidential candidate, said the bill was modeled on the state’s policy of requiring auto insurance.

“We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance,” Romney told The Washington Post last year. “And cars are a lot less expensive than people.”

Following Massachusetts lead, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed making health insurance mandatory for everyone through payroll taxes of businesses with 10 or more employees.

Clinton opponents are already lining up and it was Romney who called her plan socialized medicine in a press appearance outside St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City.

He says he favors incentives to encourage state’s to expand coverage over a federal plan.

But an article today in the Boston Globe said key elements of her plan were strikingly similar to the one implemented in Massachusetts. More “here.”:http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/09/18/in_ways_clinton_healthcare_plan_resembles_romneys_mass_solution/