Obama’s health plan could help more. A new analysis of the two very different presidential health plans of plans suggests that Se. Barack Obama’s plan has the best chance of helping more uninsured people. The report by the Commonwealth Fund, which sizes up the health plans of Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, says Obama’s plan makes health care more affordable, accessible, efficient and is a better quality than McCain’s. Democrat Obama’s pan would cover 34 million of the nation’s 67 million uninsured people in 10 years, compared to 2 million covered under McCain’s plan, says the report. “It’s a plan that tries to deal in a serious way with the uninsured,” Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, said of Obama’s plan in a telephone interview. “That is clearly a top priority. He doesn’t eliminate it, but in my view he cuts it in half over a 10-year period.” Obama’s plan seeks to build on the current employer-based insurance system, which now provides coverage to 160 million people, or more than 60 percent of the population under 65. His plan would require all employers except small businesses to either offer health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage, reports The Chicago Tribune. It would replace the current individual insurance market with an insurance exchange in which small businesses and those without access to coverage could buy a private or public health plan with tax credits. The plan also eases qualifications for low-income families to be covered under Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Obama’s plan mirrors the one put forth earlier this year by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, which would also build on the current employer-based health system, the paper reports. McCain’s plan seeks to put health insurance into the hands of individuals by removing tax breaks for employer-paid health benefits and offering tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families instead. “I think Sen. McCain’s plan is more concerned with health care costs and doing something about that through a market solution. It’s basically saying let’s have people buy their own insurance,’ Davis said. McCain would also ease state insurance restrictions and allow people to buy policies across state lines, and he would expand existing state high-risk pools for people who cannot get individual insurance because of health problems. Researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center project McCain’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured people by 1.3 million in the first year at a cost $185 million. About 20 million people would lose their employer-sponsored coverage under McCain’s plan, but 21 million would gain coverage on the individual market.

Study says AIDS started a century ago. The AIDS virus has been circulating among people for about 100 years, decades longer than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Genetic analysis pushes the estimated origin of HIV back to between 1884 and 1924, with a more focused estimate at 1908, reports The Associated Press. Previously, scientists had estimated the origin at around 1930. AIDS wasn’t recognized formally until 1981 when it got the attention of public health officials in the United States. The new result is “not a monumental shift, but it means the virus was circulating under our radar even longer than we knew,” says Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, an author of the new work. The results appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Researchers note that the newly calculated dates fall during the rise of cities in Africa, and they suggest urban development may have promoted HIV’s initial establishment and early spread. Scientists say HIV descended from a chimpanzee virus that jumped to humans in Africa, probably when people butchered chimps. Many individuals were probably infected that way, but so few other people caught the virus that it failed to get a lasting foothold, researchers say. But the growth of African cities may have changed that by putting lots of people close together and promoting prostitution, Worobey suggested. “Cities are kind of ideal for a virus like HIV,” providing more chances for infected people to pass the virus to others, he said.