No love for the mandate

The Health Care Blog had an interesting piece today comparing Joe Biden's health plan when he was in the primaries (I barely even remember him being an option, to be honest) to Obama's current plan. According to HC blog:

Both cover the usual list of Democrat health care touchpoints -- making coverage affordable with subsidies to people and businesses, creating new public options to supplement private offerings, preventing insurers from denying coverage to the sick, emphasizing prevention and chronic disease treatment, etc., etc., etc., yada yada and so forth.

Neither plan, significantly, follows the Hillary Clinton proposal for mandating coverage for all people. Neither does the vaporous plank on health care in the Democrat's party platform draft.

This makes me sad. I guess you consider Obama's statement that he'd support a single-payer system at some point in the future as his support from universal coverage, but I don't think that goes far enough. I mean, I get it. It's political doomsday to support a mandate (look at Hil now) but really look at Massachusetts. I admit that I haven't looked closely the personal effect of its mandate, or the effectiveness of the coverage, but the resulting increase in coverage is remarkable.

Oh well.