I am perfectly willing to concede that John Kerry could have managed the war on Iraq better than George Bush. My cat could have.

It’s everything else that bothers me. For example, last week Kerry gave a stem-winder of a speech in Cincinnati in which he laid out his vision. His hindsight, it turns out, is excellent. But he has trouble looking ahead.

This could be shown by his position on any of a number of domestic issues. But his position on health care shows it best.

“I’ll tell you, I am determined that when I am president, America will stop being the only industrial nation on this planet that doesn’t yet accept that health care is not a privilege for the elected or the selected or the wealthy or the connected,” Kerry announced, to cheers from the crowd. “Health care is a right for all Americans, and we’re going to make it available to all Americans.”

Fair enough. But if health care is a right, like the right to free speech, to a fair trial, etc., then it should be available to all citizens equally. How does Kerry propose to do this? He’ll do it “in a market way, in a responsible way. We invite business to be part of the solution. There’s no mandate. There’s no government program. There’s no new bureaucracy.”

You can see the problem. The poor man can’t get 15 seconds into discussing an issue before one promise trips over the other. If such a “right” can be implemented with “no government program,” then just what sort of a right could it possibly be? The only way to ensure equal health care is through a massive bureaucracy. Hillary Clinton proved that quite nicely. If you want equal health care, government has to control it.

In the post-Hillary era, a number of Democrats have offered various forms of Hillary-care lite, but all have similar flaws. Bill Bradley best illustrated them in his unsuccessful 2000 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.

Bradley proposed a plan that would have made health insurance mandatory for every child in America. But the feds would have paid the full bill for that care only if the income level for a family of four were to fall below $32,000 annually. Subsidies declined up to the $49,000 level, where they disappeared entirely. A family trying to get by on $50,000 a year in a high-cost state like New Jersey would get a big bill for mandatory health insurance but no help from the government in paying it.

Kerry’s plan is even worse. Read the fine print, available at www.johnkerry.com, and you will find that Kerrycare is Bradleycare – but without the federal subsidies.

“And one of the things I’m proudest of, our plan automatically, immediately will cover all children in America, day one. You go to school, you’re covered. You go to day care, you’re covered.”

Yes, but who’s paying for that coverage? Not Kerry. His plan as stated on his Web site proposes to “insure every child” by having social workers “automatically enrolling kids when they come to school, requiring continuous 12 months of eligibility.”

But the feds will pick up the insurance tab only for those below the federal poverty level, those with family incomes below $18,850 for a family of four. Above that level, Kerry expects states to pick up the cost of the health insurance. The Kerry plan calls for subsidies to drop off at an annual income of $56,550 for a family of four. For them, the “right” to health care turns out to be the “right” to a monthly bill they perhaps can’t afford to pay.

Don’t worry, though. Kerry also boasts that he’s going to “allow Americans to get the same plan as members of Congress.” Sounds good, except for one crucial detail. Members of Congress get that plan free. You’ll have to pay. And if you’ve got money, you can already get a health plan better than that provided to members of Congress.

These are just a few of the flaws of the Kerry plan. It has its good points, as well. But it doesn’t create a “right” to health care. And even if it were implemented in full, there would still be tens of millions of Americans without health insurance, including millions of children.

And it would cost a lot – $653 billion over 10 years, according to Kerry, and about $800 billion according to others. Where’s the money coming from? The Congressional Budget Office recently projected annual deficits in the $300 billion range stretching to the end of the decade. If Kerry intends to keep his other promise – the one about balancing the budget – he should be cutting programs, not adding them. He’s smart enough to know that. That’s his problem. If Kerry were dumb enough to believe the stuff he spouts, he might be leading in the polls. But he’s not that dumb. And it shows.