I haven't read the article, but I think that you are overlooking the very real problem of insisting that there is a single solution to health care and not working with and respecting others who disagree with you.
In this world of ours, we have to find solutions with others. I do, in my work and in my home. And I expect that this is true of everyone who has healthy interactions.
the approach taken by Kennedy, Cooper and now Obama/Cooper can't work.
Here is a good way for you to see for yourself using Mathematica Player, a free download.
It will run a Monte Carlo simulation to show that the lack of a mandate will kill its chances before it even has started.
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/Advers eSelection/
There is a good discussion of an important aspect of Clinton's plan here. The premium cap is the reason a mandate wont hurt anyone, contrary to the right wing propaganda.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/us/pol itics/28clinton.html
specifically since "can't work" isn't a scientific term, it's a subjective one. i believe that there are hundreds of studies that show it won't do what you want it to do. the problem is that only you know what you want it to do.
the real problem is that you keep pushing a non-option (the mythical health care plan from hillary that will never be implemented) opposed to the real plans from barack and mccain which have the possibility of being implemented. given your repeated attacks against the presumptive nominee, i can only assume that you prefer the mccain approach, and that you hide your preference for mccain in your loyality to hillary.
anyone with political sense always understood that hillary's health care plan was a fop. she knew she couldn't implement it, which is why she set the goal for it's passage in her 7th year, when she was a lame duck. given the fact that hillary has already proven to be an awful builder of consensus (not that hillary or her supporters believe that concensus needs to be built -- y'all seem to think it will magically be accepted despite hillary's historically high negatives!), we always understood that hillary's plans were doa. that is, if they were ever actually sent up to congress.
it was always far more likely that hillary would try to tinker with government, to impose her will temporarily on the bureaucracy. it was the best she could hope for. while we have consistently noted hillary's bad judgment (eg, her secretiveness in her health care commission, her vote for the war, her dependence on penn, etc), hillary's supporters choose to ignore that because they like her __. if only politics worked that way. barack is much more likely to deal with the complexity that faces us because he's consistently been successful at doing so. hillary, otoh, has been a failure. but i'm fairly sure these attacks are just trojan horses for your support of john mccain and his plans...
the problems, which means that litterally millions of more people will lose everything they have and perhaps hundreds of thousands more people will die because they continue to not be abe to afford healthcare in the next four years if obama wins and either his plan is adopted (which may mean prices will HAVE to rise, because he now, just recently, claimed to end risk based pricing without a mandate, which is the worst thing you can do to worsen adverse selection. If he does not end risk based pricing (as shown in Obama's FAQ on Healthcare and which Goolsbee admits) he still wont be able to help, AT ALL, the sickest 20% of Americans, those who have seen a doctor more than average - those with chronic conditions, basically everyone who the insurance inddustry considers high risk and raises rates for.)
Obama is concentrating on healthy, employed (at big employers) people. The others get left out and indeed, will almost certainly see rates rise a little (scenario 2) or a LOT (scenario 1)
Here's a good description why:
from http://www.economist.com/research/Econom ics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A
"Adverse selection
When you do business with people you would be better off avoiding. This is one of two main sorts of market failure often associated with insurance. The other is moral hazard. Adverse selection can be a problem when there is asymmetric information between the seller of insurance and the buyer; in particular, insurance will often not be profitable when buyers have better information about their risk of claiming than does the seller. Ideally, insurance premiums should be set according to the risk of a randomly selected person in the insured slice of the population (55-year-old male smokers, say). In practice, this means the average risk of that group. When there is adverse selection, people who know they have a higher risk of claiming than the average of the group will buy the insurance, whereas those who have a below-average risk may decide it is too expensive to be worth buying. In this case, premiums set according to the average risk will not be sufficient to cover the claims that eventually arise, because among the people who have bought the policy more will have above-average risk than below-average risk. Putting up the premium will not solve this problem, for as the premium rises the insurance policy will become unattractive to more of the people who know they have a lower risk of claiming. One way to reduce adverse selection is to make the purchase of insurance compulsory, so that those for whom insurance priced for average risk is unattractive are not able to opt out."
Healthcare costs - uncovered healthcare costs ESPECIALLY, are SKYROCKETING..
People are STARVING to buy medications that take pennies to manufacture.
That is why a lot of people are DEPENDING on the Democrats. They THINK things are going to start impriving next January 21, they could not care less about these feuds, and are not going to be happy when they realize they have been ripped off.
the crux of your argument is the complete opposite of what are the goals outlined by barack obama.
which means that litterally millions of more people will lose everything they have and perhaps hundreds of thousands more people will die because they continue to not be abe to afford healthcare in the next four years
given the fact that barack emphasizes affordability over mandates, this sentence is without merit. you don't seem to mind that hillary won't even get to her health care plan until her 7th year, so i'm not sure how serious i can take that comment anyway.
given barack's emphasis on process -- building a broad coalition that will support health care reform -- instead of proposals, i think you're tilting at windmills. i could understand if barack was like hillary (it's my way or the highway), but he's not. his proposal is the starting point, not the end point...
This is an interesting plot...
