Hmm. You make some interesting claims there; the opinion based ones are yours to make, but I fail to see your point as to the health care differences between Senator Clinton and Obama.

Perhaps you could illustrate the collapse you speak or, or go over in more detail the shortcomings of his plan, I would be more understanding.

I don't know how good your memory is, but that (NAFTA) was one of the areas where Hillary openly disagreed with Bill.

Google it..

Obama's been way out in the lead on solid plans for the economy. It'll be interesting to see what Clinton has to say in her speech today. Obama's yesterday was very well received.

Clinton's plan for the housing market, on the other hand, has been described as "the dumbest solution to the current mortgage mess I've heard from a top presidential contender". Other publications have said that it would cause chaos and worsen the housing plight of the nation. It'll be interesting to see if she revises or dumps this idea.

The economy is not an issue that Clinton is going to be winning PA on right now, though. She still can -- it's a ways to the primary -- but right now Obama's plans are considerably stronger.

If you do start with universal mandates and do not have an extremely strong regulatory position in place as to cost management on the insurance company side (which Clinton's plan really doesn't have, it has fairly weak cost controls that aren't significantly different than Obama's), what you've done is remove any incentive for insurance companies to cost-manage or cut front-end costs since their revenue stream is protected by the US government.

The risk pool is fully universal for children, so your argument makes no sense there. There is a mandate on coverage for children and not adults because there is already an existing framework for providing extremely low-cost coverage for children (SCHIP, for which Clinton gets some level of credit, and other programs), whereas there are not such frameworks in place for adults.

Again, without extremely stringent controls on front-end costs, what you're doing with mandates is not "making the risk pool universal", what you're doing is forcing low-income people to fund insurance companies by force of government. When you hear reports that Obama's plans will leave X million not covered, they're not referring to healthy people with decent incomes. Those people are overwhelmingly likely to opt in because costs are low, benefits are good, and they have the income to support it (versus more expensive partly-employer-funded options -- my "employer-paid" coverage costs me hundreds a month).

No, the people that they're arguing are left out are poor people with iffy medical histories. Such people definitely deserve coverage too. But including them does not improve the risk pool, it makes it worse. And for healthy poor people it actually significantly harms them, because they're now required by legal mandate to pay for health care that they do not need. For unhealthy poor people it's still a net loss, because we're shifting funding from emergency rooms to the backs of the poor. Yes, emergency room care is the worst way to provide health care, but this isn't a better way for poor people.

If you want a scheme like Clinton's to work, you need the "enforcement mechanism" to be an income threshold such that anyone who cannot pay for health care by some reasonable standard has it provided for them without mandates, sanctions, wage garnishment, etc. That of course starts to somewhat approach single-payer, at least for the poor.

In the absence of such a requirement, what you're really doing is mandating that poor people fund health insurance companies to their own detriment. That's hardly a progressive solution to health care.

Obama's plan, while flawed, at least provides some mechanism for cost containment and refuses to treat the poor as a mandatory profit center for the insurance industry.

Healthcare reformed failed because of Bill and Hillary's ego....plain and simple.  I'm as progressive as one can be but you can't storm the Bastille with one pitchfork.  You need a movement of millions who will stand together and let the companies and dirty politicians know that their time is done.  Yet, they still haven't learned.  Instead of going to the people they are repeating the same mistakes of the 90s.

On topic??? Answer the question? Come'on.

Jim Cramer at PA last night said th old steel factory is being turned into a casino??!!!

The big numbers were:
Obama 49, McCain 40 (Obama +9)
Clinton 46, McCain 43 (Clinton +3)

That's not doing better under any measure I understand.

Clinton is doing better than Obama with women and very slightly with Latinos. Obama is doing better with men and among independents of all subgroups.

Yes, they'll both win California in the end. That's not the point. The point is that Obama is clearly running better than Clinton in one of those big Democratic states that's supposed to be her base, and isn't losing to a major extent any of the demographic groups that are supposed to be his undoing, while doing much better than Clinton with independents, which are (as always) the true key to victory.

As an Obama supporter, you have a point.  This has nothing to do with Hillary, this is something Obama needs to focus on more.  He is doing a small-group trip around the state, and I think will be able to make some inroads with that, in addressing this group of voters, in settings where some of the garbage being flung in this election is less intrusive.

Obama is going to get wiped out in the general because of it. His main argument towards working class whites is to accuse them of racism if they don't support him.

Those are not "right-wing, pro-business" attacks, unless you consider homeowners to be business.

Clinton's proposals on the housing market are terrible. Yes, they would bail out people with bad mortgages now. They would also make it pretty much impossible for anyone else to buy homes for the foreseeable future.

I agree with you that more progressive proposals would be better, actually. I'm a proponent of that approach. But Clinton's proposals on the housing market are not progressive, they're a combination of anti-business and anti-consumer, and act to protect existing homeowners for a limited time by destroying the lending industry (rather than merely the bad part of it) and destroying the ability of existing homeowners to refinance out of the disaster, so that when her freeze ends there'll be nowhere for them to go.

I wouldn't be attacking Clinton's progressive economic plans; to the limited extent that she has any, I supporting them. I do support some of her views on redoing the tax system, but then Obama has the same view. Aside from that, Obama has put himself in a better position to actually make progressive economic changes.

Silence, most often, equals complicity.

The math is simple... Oh why bother. Sure. She can win. Carry on.

Did you get lost?

This is a diary about Pennsylvania and not about health care, in which a specific question was asked about Obama's bus trip and which I answered.

And you accuse me of "changing the subject"?

Really?

The real question we need answered is mandates and how she will enforce them. I understand fully your perception of how UHC works and that Obama's plan is, in your opinion, a trojan horse designed to not get us to UHC.

Fine, that's your belief.

I'm for single-payer, actually; I don't like either plan. But your argument seems to be that healthy people are going to opt out of the system and raise costs for everyone.

Now, on its face, that seems like a rather poor argument. After all, to the extent that there's allowed to be rate discrimination in the first place, healthy people would pay lower rates, so they have less incentive to drop out. Also, experience with such plans has been that the people who drop out are very low-income people who tend to be un-*healthy. So by your own logic Obama's plan should actually considerably cut health care insurance costs for most people, albeit raise emergency room costs.

On the other hand, Clinton's plan needs an enforcement mechanism? Are you going to arrest people who don't get covered? Garnish their wages? Fine them? Tax them (no, that's single-payer, in essence)? How much of a penalty will they pay for breaking the law? Suppose they have no wages to garnish, or can't pay the fine -- are we could to have mandatory work (remember, the welfare system isn't what it was, and who did *that again?) or debtor's prisons?

Honestly, the Clinton plan sounds like a government mandate to purchase the product of a private corporation or face a nebulous enforcement mechanism. Yes, we do this right now with auto insurance, for instance -- but you can avoid it by not owning a car, and you only need to carry very basic liability. There doesn't seem to be a low-cost "basic health" option in the Clinton plan, and there's no way to opt out of it.

Against that you have some very vague promises to "cut costs" -- but remember there's zero economic incentive for the insurance companies to cut costs because people are mandated to buy the product, no matter what it costs. Of course, there can be economic competition between insurance companies, but is there really an incentive to compete economically if level of coverage is mandated?

Economic competition works between auto insurers because they can manage level of coverage, provide varying levels of customer service, be more or less draconian in what they cover, take more or less risk in terms of their asset to risk balance, etc. It's not at all clear that health insurance companies will have flexibility to manage costs in those ways. By including mandates you remove any threat to the front-end revenue stream, so you're essentially arguing that they'll cut costs and lower the front-end cost out of the goodness of their heart.

Essentially, my view is that the Clinton form of UHC is a multi-billion-dollar giveaway to the health insurance companies, putting them in a privileged monopoly position in which the legal system will enforce mandatory purchase of their products and removing external incentives for them to streamline their processes. The Obama plan, while not nearly as good as single-payer, still preserves some chance of actual cost controls within the system, and allows people who would be unable to pay even a low-cost plan to opt out, instead of penalizing them for the crime of being poor.

There's a reason why Clinton receives the most donations from the healthcare industry of any presidential candidate. Maybe it's just that she was "inevitable" and they want a seat at the table. But it may also be that they see this as rolling out a giant trough for them to feed at.

There. Done changing the subject.

a company that uses a lot of labor, I am going to go wherever labor is cheapest, which I think would be the dollar a day countries..

Its "my duty to my stockholders"

What is Obama going to do to CHANGE THAT?

One thing to remember. Moore's Law. Every eighteen months, the power of computers available for a given dollar price doubles. Its increasing exponentially.

What that means is that not too far in the future, almost all scriptable jobs will be done by machines in one way or another.

At that point, we will need to be concentrating on how to preserve wealth in the middle class and lower class because THERE WONT BE MUCH WAGE INCOME TO SPEAK OF FOR MANY OF THEM.

Silicon will be cheaper.

Right now, humans are the cheapest supercomputers available. Thats why we can walk, drive, and the million other things we can learn well, quickly.

With networked computers, teach one how to do something and they all learn it. With autonomous navigation, computers will be able to drive.

The financial motivation is huge and its happening.

This is the first time I've seen him explain his approach so clearly, and it is why he has such a hard time with the Democratic base.

With a certain part of the Democratic base -- the part that's dying, specifically. The part that the Clintons largely ignored in pursuing their Third Way politics.

The workers in Pennsylvania know that getting government out of the way will not help them.

Then it's a good thing that Obama has suggested no such thing.

Their problem is not lobbyists in Washington, it is the market based approach to job growth that Obama outlines in this speech.

I'm actually rather fond of the market-based approach to job-growth. It's quite a bit more successful than the statist-based approach. You'll notice that unemployment in the U.S. hasn't reached 6% in more than 15 years. In countries where the government takes a much more active role, it's generally much higher. Now, you can argue that jobs in those countries are better, but you certainly can't argue that they're more plentiful.

Our government has not done enough in the past twenty years, even in the Clinton years, to take care of working and middle class people. Clinton is talking about that, Obama is pushing market based solutions.

No, I think Obama is talking about that as well. What Obama does avoid, however, are ham-fisted gimicks like a temporary freeze on foreclosures. Obama puts more emphasis on education and retraining, which are the only solutions for out-of-work laborers.    

You're misreading what Obama said (and no, I'm not accusing you of an intentional misread). You're mistaking his talk of "fair competition" as meaning a hands-off market-based solution.

Fight for Fair Trade: Obama will fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs. He will use trade agreements to spread good labor and environmental standards around the world and stand firm against agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement that fail to live up to those important benchmarks. Obama will also pressure the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports.

That's not a hands-off market-based free-trade solution, that's a barriers-based solution that places barriers in sensible places (labor and environmental standards) rather than blanket tariffs.

Obama will strengthen the ability of workers to organize unions. He will fight for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Obama will ensure that his labor appointees support workers' rights and will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers. Obama will also increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation to ensure it rises every year.

Again, these are not free-market-based solutions in the sense you're intending. These are pro-labor positions that operate to establish rules for the free market. This is part of why many unions are pro-Obama.

Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act: The FMLA covers only certain employees of employers with 50 or more employees. Obama will expand it to cover businesses with 25 or more employees. He will expand the FMLA to cover more purposes as well, including allowing workers to take leave for elder care needs; allowing parents up to 24 hours of leave each year to participate in their children's academic activities; and expanding FMLA to cover leave for employees to address domestic violence.

Again, this is not a free-market approach. The free-market view would be that this is a benefit and benefits should be determined by employers. This is a rights-based regulatory approach.

"Ensuring fair competition" is actually a pro-regulatory view. The free-marketers in general believe that merely providing a free market is in itself ensuring fair competition. That's not what Obama's talking about here. He's talking about a regulatory framework within which fair competition exists.