That we can't have affordability of healthcare so long as we have private, for-profit insurance corporations acting as middlemen.  Look, not even the mafia takes 30% off the top!  And no other industrialized country uses care dollars to support this kind of enormous middleman-infrastructure....and they all provide better healthcare at about half the cost.

Good run down.

I didn't make the argument that there were no differences, I made the argument that the differences don't matter much in the context of your third point,

Obama's plan makes Health Care a choice, whereas Edwards plan makes Health Care a requirement.

Now be honest, does it really matter if it's a requirement to get health insurance, if people who couldn't afford it on their own will be subsidized, and can choose between a mix of private and public plans?  Would it really be that much of an imposition to have to have health insurance under those conditions?  This is the point I was making: under Edwards' plan, where coverage is required, no one has a logical reason to not want health insurance, and under Obama's plan, where it is not required, no one has a logical reason to not have health insurance.  

Please keep pointing this out because they just can't seem to accept the fact that Obamas plan is better so they keep saying they are the same. No they are not!

Obama/Clinton/whomever are talking about Health Insurance Plans - they are not talking about Healthcare; and they won't have to keep one single promise they make since the economy is set to expire right when he/she is scheduled to take office;

http://www.calnurses.org/sicko/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiEl1Ecqn AY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ecalnurses 2Eorg%2Fsicko%2F

http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/

We don't need insurance we need guaranteed healthcare

Video Clip : Michael Moore - Sicko discussion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCzUeI0NL GU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edailykos% 2Ecom%2Fstory%2F2007%2F5%2F31%2F124844%2 F991

The Healthcare Problem

Our healthcare system is frail - and making our patients sick. Even people with expensive insurance are denied health care, and many Americans can't afford any insurance at all.

The Guaranteed Healthcare Solution

It doesn't have to be this way. Registered Nurses support Guaranteed Healthcare to give our patients the care they need. We don't need over-priced insurance - we need Guaranteed Healthcare.
The political terrain is shifting underneath the "Big 3" Democratic presidential candidates as they take baby steps on the nation's most urgent domestic issue: healthcare.

While their campaigns try to negotiate with the toxic health insurance sector, in the hopes of making them slightly less dangerous to patients, public dislike of these bad actors is about to be crystallized by Michael Moore's powerful new film SiCKO.  Like Edwards and Obama before her, Hillary Clinton needs to score some tickets.  It's not too late for any of the three of them to change course on their healthcare proposals.

Maybe they'll come to one of the opening night screenings you host--see the bottom of this post.
Hillary Clinton, of course, should know better.  HillaryCare I was a Rude Goldberg-like travesty premised on the idea of creating an incredibly complicated scheme in order to carve out a safe zone for insurance industry profits.  Clinton announced last week that she plans on making many of the same mistakes.

Well not explicity, but her healthcare program is so complicated that she can't even announce it in one speech.  It's hacked into three parts, and appears to be a laundry list of new regulations--rather than an easy-to-understand and elegant approach (say--"modernize Medicare and extend it to all Americans," or, "work with doctors and hospitals to replace all the insurance companies with a single, non-profit fund that covers all Americans.  You pick your own doctor--and they are paid to provide care, not deny it.

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speec h/view/?id=1789

She says:There are three parts to my approach. First, lowering costs for everyone. Second, improving quality for everyone. Third, insuring everyone.

That last one of course being the scary one--she didn't say guaranteeing care for everyone, she said insuring everyone.  So our healthcare system will still be based on a perverse dis-incentive...insurers make more money by figuring out how to deny you care.

Many of her reforms seem nice enough, and common to Obama's and Edwards' plans: guaranteeing insurance corporations have to issue you coverage, fixing how they price it, cracking down on their overhead.

But her plan still saddles healthcare with a middleman that takes hundreds of billions of dollars into profits and overhead and CEO salaries.  Trimming that a little doesn't change the main dynamic--and it sets the government up for continuous running battles with the insurance companies over arcane regulatory issues, while the insurers fix the system by pumping obscene amounts of money into political bank accounts.
All of which is just more care dollars being wasted on trifles that propel medical inflation.

Now despite her safe, tinkering plan, Clinton, like Obama and Edwards, seems to understand that the insurers are the bad guys here--she rails against them, but doesn't really take them on.  Matthew Holt, a respected healthcare blogger, notes this bizarre disparity:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matt hew_holt/2007/05/the_cautious_approach.h tml

Funnily enough, neither Clinton nor Obama have gone the logical route that one might expect them to go, given their similar assessments of insurance companies and their historical liberal leanings. A Brit or a Canadian hearing stories like this might suspect that the Democrats are en route to instituting a government-based health insurance scheme that would look something like Canada's.

Meanwhile, the pressure continues to rise while, like a frog boiling in a pot, too many Americans are fearful of jumping out.

Now what might encourage all these folks to change their minds is SiCKO.  Americans are about to experience the toxic insurance in full, big-screen color.  Healthcare politics are about to change--are they ready?

America's nurses are.  More details to come, but the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee are co-hosts for the movie's 3000 opening nights across the country.  We aim to turn hundreds of thousands of movies-goers into hundreds of thousands of patients advocates with a unique organizing campaign.

1. The Obama plan is not universal healthcare, instead it's a "make healthcare more affordable / expand access to healthcare" plan.
Unlike Edwards, and even Mit Romney, Obama's plan cannot be considered "universal" because it doesn't require people to sign up and doesn't have the necessary funding to fully subsidize the poor and working poor.

2. Obama's plan does form a public insurance program, which is a vital part of any serious healthcare reform. However, the Obama plan does not set the public and private plans in competition with each other, as the Edwards plan does.  Obama's plan allows only those uninsured by their employer to join the public plan, while Edwards allows any American to join the public healthcare insurer. Thus, unless this key feature is changed, Obama's plan won't lead to single-payer as Americans vote with their wallets for a superior public insurer and it relies only on regulations, not competition, to force the private insurance companies to work in the public interest.

for children. If a mandate isn't important, why does Obama use one to ensure coverage for children? Hence his defense of his plan makes no sense.

There's a consensus that a mandate (bad word: Dems should come up with a better one), either a government or individual one, is a prerequisite for universal coverage. Obama rejected the consensus--why, I don't know. But his plan is not a plan for universal coverage. That's one reason why I can't find a single indepedent health care expert or policy wonk who thinks Obama's plan is superior to Edwards's or Wyden's. Let me say that one more time:

Obama's is not a plan for universal health care coverage.

provide universal health care.

Once again, not enough.  It's a pattern of failing to lead on what matters.  

only aims to cover everyone by 2012, as I have pointed out earlier.

Not sure what the phasing-in scheme is, but in the interim, not everyone will be covered.

No, catastrophic coverage limits the out-of-pocket expenses one can have in a year.  

Both Edwards and Obama's plans allow for private insurance coverage, which means coverage gaps within the public system. This is America after all.... mandatory programs go against the very ideas this country was founded upon. People should have the right to take their chances and whatever consequences go along with them. People should have the right to make dumb decisions.

I think the real question is what to do with people who suffer illness and have not bought into the system. As it is now we end up paying for their medical care anyway, so at the worst Obama's plan is no different from the current situation on that one issue, and is much better than the current situation on everything else.

And Edwards mandatory plan has a whole host of difficulties of its own. Who enforces it? What about people who simply refuse to pay? Do we send people to jail for not being insured as with liability insurance when driving? And what's the cost of that going to be?

I said Obama's plan is no different than the current situation Re what happens with the uninsured, but that's not really true. The difference is under Obama's plan there should be many fewer uninsured, so it's still better than the current situation even on that measure.

So the next question becomes--What will the enforcement costs be for Edwards mandatory plan? Will the savings from having more people in the system make up for them? Or will the enforcement costs outweigh the benefits?

Thoughts?