Hi Mike,
It sounds like you genuinely didn't know that Clinton and Edwards' plans set up a public plan (similar to Medicare) that people can buy into if they choose. So nobody will be forced to buy from a private insurer.
What annoys me is that Obama's campaign has been pushing this patently false idea, to the point that a lot of people actually believe it. (A lot of pro-Obama folks online keep repeating this point too. I can't tell if they simply don't know they're wrong, or they don't care. It's hard to tell.) Again, this is part of the complaints many Democrats have with Obama--he's not content to have left mandates out of his plan, he also has to go make the Republican case against Democratic health care plans. So that he can get elected. As Ezra Klein said, he's lying. There's no other word for it. (Well, maybe there is another word: Paul Krugman called it "unscrupulous demagoguery."
Best wishes.
And yet, somehow Obama is seen as progressive...
Well health care can't be the only measure of that. For example, HRC supports draconian criminal justice and immigration policies.
Specifics please? I was at her town hall last week and heard a very sensible, pragmatic approach to immigration.
She's for removing due process from the immigration court system for immigrants that have committed a crime. People's lives were destroyed when her husband passed IIRIRA but this is even worse. People get into trouble. That doesn't mean they should be banished from the US and separated from their families.
She's against retroactive application of the USSC sentencing guidelines despite saying that she understands the prior guidelines might have been used in a discriminatory manner or had a discriminatory effect. More than a decade ago some fundamental fairness in the crack/cocaine disparity was tried but her husband shot it down and she's no better.
