As long as that's the case, I think it's pretty clear that the BCBS, KP, GH and HPs of the world will stiff patients. Healthcare is a right, and the most efficient way to deliver it is to rationalize the administrative overhead all the while extended the mutualization pool to cover each and everyone.
Clinton's plan? Leftist it ain't. To the left of Obama's? Sure, on paper. Krugman's right about that.
But leftist would actually fund that mandate by not only rolling back the bipartisan Bush tax cuts, but re-establishing substantial tax progressivity at the personal and corporate income tax level. Government provided insurance of guaranteed equitable access to healthcare. That's more leftist. Nationalize the bloodsucking insurance companies - now you're talking.
Not directly going after the insurance companies, the tax inqeuities and healthcare access issues, essentially leaving in place the market-based for-profit medical delivery system, as Hillary (and let's be honest, Obama too) proposes? Not leftist. Not ultra-neoliberal, but not social medicine, either.
You're right - Hillary's plan would be a bitter pill to swallow. People are worried about their healthcare, losing access to it, how they can afford premiums and going bankrupt if they can't and get sick. And now Billary are saying they're going to require coverage, for people who can't even figure out how to pay the mortgage, the rent and decent food for their kids? So now they add to all the other fears the fear of the waterboarding Federal government, the one which has a knack for coming up with unfunded mandate after unfunded mandate, coming after them because they didn't buy coverage?
Damn right that's a bitter pill.
Obama at least understands this, and frames his objections to Hillary's "bitter pill" with a left frame, invoking people's fears of not being able to afford it.
Again, on paper, her's makes more economic sense, but neither one is good, and Obama wins on the framing and on not being tone-deaf to what working people fear.
Full disclosure, I didn't caucus for either of them. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
With mandates, an employee would have to take any incentive from his private company to leave the company's plan and reinvest that incentive in the gov't plan. Will there be pain in the transition? I imagine so. But businesses will be putting this transition on the fast track in order to recover the unwieldy costs of having to provide health insurance for their workers. They will absolutely see the money sense of giving workers higher salaries in exchange for not having to provide them health care. If I'm paying $180 a month right now (I am) and my employer is chipping in $310 (it is) then that combined $500 a month should be enough for me to buy into the gov't plan (in fact, the gov't plan may even be less). Poor people who are squeezed? They have to be subsidized. The fact is, many of the working poor do not even have health insurance right now. This is what the health care plan is all about, providing coverage to the uninsured, because otherwise it's not going to happen. Without mandates, we're still going to have a ton of uninsured. With mandates, we will be transitioning to a single-payer system. When a huge proportion of the workforce is under a gov't plan, the transition to universal health care would be easy because the gov't could then deal directly with health care providers.
I'm at a loss to see why you're coming down harder on Clinton for health care when Obama's plan leaves a LOT more to be desired. Hillary is showing leadership on this issue. Obama isn't. I was a former Edwards' support, and if you read the Edwards diary here you'll see me say that I'd be a lot more willing to go with Obama if I could trust him on health care. He used to be excellent on it a couple years ago, but his positions have changed radically on this issue.
In any event, the devil is in the details.
You mouth platitudes about how the working poor will magically get covered with the Clinton plan. Somebody's got to show them the money though, because as you know, fucking the working poor has been a bipartisan sport since the 1970's. Fear of an unfunded mandate by the working poor is not an irrational fear,
Here are some of the other mandates the nanny-state upper-middle class and wealthy wing, the dominant wing of the Democratic party, has given them: ever more expensive child-restraint seats in cars, auto-emissions standards which make it hard for the average jalopy to get tabs/vignettes (this one hit me particularly hard when I was struggling) ever shifting burden of public school expenditures to parents via fees, kids left out of extracurriculars due to cost, et c...Think these are small beer? You try to tell that to a single mom making 20K/year with two kids and no spousal support.
Sorry, but if you have a party which hasn't put up anything on the boards for working people in decades, you'd best spell out exactly how this is going to work such that working people's discretionary incomes will not be hammered. Again, working people's fear of Democrats hitting their discretionary income is both very real and very rational.
What's really surprising to me in all of this is that there is a simple answer to all this. Take on the corporations, and fight for the wealthy to pay their fair share. Instead, we get this corporatist DLC bullshit which quite frankly is less than inspiring. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
If you're holding out for a single-payer system, then good luck. And in 10 years when we don't have one we can discuss how maybe 10 years of transition from 2008 to 2018 would have been worth--if we had only pushed for mandates.
Your guy Obama is the very guy who said transitioning directly to a universal system is impossible. If you start from scratch, yes. But not in America. Those are Obama's words. I fail to see how in a thread about Obama/Clinton you are laying into Clinton for not going for universal coverage when your very own candidate scoffs completely at even the idea of universal coverage.
