Slate: Obama has the better argument on health care

[BeyondGeography]

Obama v. Clinton on "Universality"
The health-care primary, part 6.
By Timothy Noah

==Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are slugging it out over their respective health care plans. It's a fairly pointless argument to begin with, because they both have pretty good proposals on the table. (Click here for my earlier discussion of Obama's plan, and here for my earlier discussion of Hillary's.) Paul Krugman of the New York Times has weighed in on Hillary's side of the dispute, and so, less emphatically, has John Nichols of the Nation. But to the very limited extent that this debate is worth following at all, it's Obama who has the better argument.

...Enrolling people in a private health care plan isn't the hard part; forcing people to pay for a private health care plan is the hard part. Yes, the government has procedures to collect student loans and unpaid taxes, but it's understood that such payments are obligations. There's little disagreement that if you take out a loan, you're obliged to repay it, and only slightly more disagreement (mostly among crackpots) that as a citizen you are obliged to share in the cost of government. I believe there would be a lot of disagreement about whether the government could compel you to buy a private health insurance policy.

...Political salability is the only reason for Democratic candidates to bend themselves into pretzels to maintain a meaningful role for private health insurers in the first place. It wouldn't make much sense to sacrifice that salability by forcing voters to participate in the private health insurance market more than they wish to.

...Advocates of individual mandates are right to worry about nonparticipation. "As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don't feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else," Krugman points out. But the most logical solution to this problem, as Krugman himself has written elsewhere, is to make health insurance a function of the government, as it is already for the poor and the elderly. People may object to the specter of "socialized medicine," but at least they grasp that there's nothing unusual about the government collecting insurance premiums in the form of taxes for Medicare and Medicaid.

It may be necessary to achieve the goal of expanding government-administered health insurance in stages. All the health care plans of the major Democratic candidates are premised on that assumption, whether they acknowledge it or not. The only Democratic candidate I'm aware of who dispenses with such gradualism is Dennis Kucinich, whose solution—"Medicare For All"—is the only one that will solve the health care mess in the long run. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all have plans that would steadily enlarge the role of government health insurance. These are accommodations to political reality. I question the wisdom of including, within such an accommodation, a mandate that would render that accomodation unattractive to a large bloc of voters. If we're going to create a ruckus, better to do it in the service of a more comprehensive solution than either Clinton or Edwards has put forth. If we aren't, Obama's resistence to an individual mandate makes perfect sense.

http://www.slate.com/id/2178896/