Presidential candidate Bill Bradley’s health care plan is, as he says, more ambitious than the proposal recently supported by his opponent, Vice President Al Gore. But it is also cut of the same cloth, with the same incremental ideas about expanding access and expecting businesses to foot much of the bill.

More unfortunate are Mr. Bradley’s cost projections, which do not seem to jibe with his promises. He is claiming near-universal coverage of 45 million uninsured Americans, a prescription drug benefit under Medicare and a public health campaign on $55 billion to $65 billion a year. Among his assumptions are that the poor can be covered for $1,800 a year. One option for them under the plan would be the Federal Employees benefit Program, used by members of Congress. But the standard annual premium under that plan is approximately one-third more than that.

The Bradley plan fails to grasp that partial support for families without any means to buy health care coverage is not going to be useful. His plan includes covering children at up to 200 percent of the poverty level as a means of reducing the number of uninsured, but several states, including Maine, already cover the large majority of this group. His plans drain federal surplus money identified for strengthening Medicare without saying how that shortfall would be made up.

For all the time and thinking the former senator put into producing this plan, he presented something that looks very much like the sort of thing that Congress has been happy to ignore during the last five or six years. It is ignored because it is not affordable. It is not affordable because it does next to nothing to reduce the costs of health care and health insurance. Without this key component, medical inflation and increased use would soon drive up health-insurance costs and make the estimates that this plan projects look puny.

Sen. Bradley’s plan may indeed be bolder than one offered by the vice president, but it stands no better chance of curing the ills of the system.