That Mandates Thing
In the spirit of intellectual honsety, let me say that the one thing that drives me crazy about Barack Obama is his role in the debate over healthcare mandates. I'm not bothered so much by his mere opposition to them, but rather by his complete demagoguery of the issue.
Exhibit A: The Obama campaign is sending out mailers playing on the Harry and Louise imagery used to defeat "Hillarycare" the first time around. Here's one of them:
The text asks if forcing people who can't afford healthcare to buy it is the best solution to the problem. And the mailer sure makes that sound scary. But healthcare experts who care about universal coverage agree it in fact is the best solution to the problem, assuming that low-cost options are available. Via Ezra Klein, the Urban Institute writes:
In this brief we conclude that, absent a single payer system, it is not possible to achieve universal coverage without an individual mandate. The evidence is strong that voluntary measures alone would leave large numbers of people uninsured. Voluntary measures would tend to enroll disproportionate numbers of individuals with higher cost health problems, creating high premiums and instability in the insurance pools in which they are enrolled, unless further significant government subsidization is provided. The government would also have difficulty redirecting current spending on the uninsured to offset some of the cost associated with a new program without universal coverage.
Andrew Sullivan -- "socialized medicine" hater extraordinaire -- prefers Obama's approach to Clinton's on the merits, which is pretty indicative that it's wrong. Now, in Obama's defense, their plans are mostly similar and the fact that Obama has advocated for a single-payer system in the past -- and still lists it as his ideal system -- shows he isn't some right-winger on the issue. Jonathan Cohn has a great
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