"no candidate has proposed requiring anyone to buy insurance from a private insurance company. In fact, the existence of a public, Medicare-like option is a central feature of the Clinton/Edwards plan."
You understand of course that doctors have the option of refusing to take lower payout medical insurances, just as many do today and refuse to care for Medicare recipients. And when you look at the variables left that could conceivably lower medical costs apart from insurance company profits, exuberant drug costs, and outrageous hospitalization costs, people who opt for the Medicare-like option will get the Medicare-like option and all the drawbacks that it entails.
Until we get a single payer not-for-profit universal health care system, the kind that Hillary abhors, we will not control medical costs and rationing will continue. This system, which feeds the corporations, is part of the Republican Lite version of the Democratic party Hillary and Bill are attempting to bring back.
We can do better than this and with a Democratic Congress, it is doable.
"Until we get a single payer not-for-profit universal health care system, the kind that Hillary abhors, we will not control medical costs and rationing will continue. This system, which feeds the corporations, is part of the Republican Lite version of the Democratic party Hillary and Bill are attempting to bring back."
The problem with the health care system is the cost which shuts people out and rations care.
The cost is so high because we have a private system that is inefficient. And it's inefficient because we support a parasitical insurance industry through our health care payments. Every other advanced industrialized country in the world does it a different way.
That way is single-payer health care. Eliminating costs by eliminating profits from the middle man.
Any attempt to graft universal coverage over the top of our present broken system will only dramatically increase costs and would be unsustainable.
Naturally, this is a political loser for everybody. Obama's coverage is NOT universal. Hillary's isn't really universal either. But, frankly universal health care will be WILDLY UNPOPULAR if it is put into place by mandates because you are forcing millions of people (the young and healthy) who don't currently pay for health care to purchase it.
Why? Because unless you eliminate runaway cost from the system, by getting the insurance industry out of it, you're forcing people to pay more for health care coverage, to cover the older and sicker.
Maybe that's sensible, even necessary, but it they won't like it. At all. And those are only the tip of the iceberg flaws with the way both plans are proposed.
I remember back in 1993 Bill Clinton talking up his health-care proposal at the time. He asked the audience what percentage of them liked their HMOs. He looked absolutely shocked that so many people HATED managed care (for reasons that everybody understands now).
Democrats need to avoid being chained to an albatross of "universal health care" that is neither universal, nor solves the problem of run-away cost, and is wildly unpopular to boot.
If we get caught in the trap of "doing what's possible" even though it won't work, we'll be crushed by the Republicans for years afterwards. The first failed attempt to introduce health care reform helped bring down the Democratic congress in 1993. We can't afford another mistake like that!
Keeping talking.
You put the problems with both the Hillary and Obama plans, which exceed their trivial differences, in a nutshell. They do not come close to the liberal social democratic systems in play in the EU and the English speaking countries.
Hillary has said repeatedly that she would support and sign a single payer bill if it passed Congress, she favors single payer. It is deception to say "she abhors" single payer, that's obviously untrue. Even the Congressional sponsors of HR 676, the Conyers/Kucinich single payer bill, insist we must build the political will and movement to get single payer in the US, now far too many Americans no longer trust government to administer a single payer program, only 35% favored single payer in the last major poll, while over 50% favored the hybrid plans, like the Clinton plan, that preserves their choice to keep what they have now if they like it. 80% of Americans are report being relatively content with their current health insurance, many because they have never needed to use it for a major, or chronic illness, and put it to the test to see whether it really meets their needs.
