If you are making under 10,000 a year you will be eligible for 100% subsidized insurance, plain and simple. In Massachusetts, where mandates are in effect, over 60,000 people have been granted waivers to not buy insurance because there is no affordable plan available to them, no one is forced to buy what they cannot afford. All families will only have to pay a small percentage of their annual income toward health insurance, the amount is capped in Clinton's plan.

Obama's health care plan is significantly less courageous than Clinton's, and it doesn't make sense. If you do not require a mandate for everyone to have health insurance, but require the insurance companies to grant policies to everyone who asks for them, people will be able to buy policies AFTER they get sick - this is like buying home owner insurance after your house is already burning. The insurance companies will never agree to such a program, and there is no way to make it economically sustainable, even if we had single payer national health insurance available. Health insurance will only work if it requires "everybody in, nobody out."

I want to point out strongly that among low income people  who are eligible for Medicaid and other free public health insurance programs offered in the states, out of 100% of those eligible, only approximately 47% will sign up. This is true across the US. So there are many reasons that people do not sign up for health insurance outside of "they cannot afford it" as Obama claims. In Massachusetts, where there is now a mandate in effect, 92% of those eligible for free health insurance sign up. That is a huge improvement. Now a tremendous number of low income people have free health insurance who did not have it before, including preventive care. It is really a mandate on government to provide health insurance to the poor. Obama's plan betrays low income people.

The contradictions and obvious lack of teeth in Obama's health care plan, along with his nasty attacks on the far more progressive Clinton plan cause me to severely distrust his integrity and grasp of adequate solutions to this life and death issue. Along with his absurd claims that he will have his health plan adopted within the first year of his administration. Everyone in healh care understands how ridiculous that claim is. There is no way for his proposals to work, they are just so much verbiage. Worse, he adopts right wing talking points to destroy the dream of universal health care.

I am a single payer advocate, and single payer uses progressive taxation to include everyone in the financing mechanism to provide health care for all. It is a mandate, simply in other words, using taxes to pay instead of premiums (with subsidies for the poor). Single payer would be far more efficient, however. We need a grassroots movement to press for single payer, the only economically sustainable way to provide adequate health care access to everyone.