I don't think the Health Insurance Reform Act was a great progressive achievement.

[Leopolds Ghost]

121. It's NOT a Republican Lie. I was reading about this bill in the Washington Monthly at the THINK TANK

stage, when it was being drafted. That is what the drafters said (they also explicitly said that the reason Clinton's bill failed is because the insurance industry wasn't brought in to help draft it) -- before Rahm Emanuel got back into the national spotlight.

The goal was to create a "captive pool" of young, healthy recipients in order to keep the private insurance system from collapse -- and prevent a movement toward single payer, which the drafters said was the way they got insurance to participate -- by telling them that mandated private health care was the only way to forestall single payer.

The public option was to be paid for entirely by fines on private insurance-eligible citizens, by the way.

I.e. if the 20% fail to carry private insurance, they are not eligible for the public option (due to limits on subscription to the public option) and would accordingly be fined, *cough* taxed* and the fines would be used to pay for the public option for the few working class people who qualify, essentially.

That was the math, as stated by the people that wrote the bill, in the Washington Monthly. Years ago.