Guaranteed Healthcare

Robert Kuttner, one of the most prescient health care writers, lays out the very real problems with individual mandates in a must-read article that could not be more relevant to the national healthcare debates:

"Massachusetts' experience with health-care reform illustrates the problem of an individual mandate absent comprehensive reform: It makes a social failure the problem of the individual."

It's called the great risk shift and there are no work-arounds for it, no amendments to the bill.  Individual mandates are an attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of our healthcare system--and, by the way, end single-payer reforms forever.  Oh and moreover, it would give billions of new care dollars to insurance corporations.

The gooe news is that there is a precedent now for defeating these fool-hardy individual mandate plans.  The California Senate looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger's mandate bill, listened to the protests of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, and ran very fast the other way.  The bill only got 1 vote in committee. 

It is equally un-passable nationally.

Someone needs to tell that to Sen. Clinton.  As Bloomberg details this morning, she calls for penalizing the uninsured in a plan that is much closer to Mitt Romney's than Barack Obama's.  What will the penalties be?  Garnished wages?  Debtor's prison?

Oh, and please read the Physicians for a National Health Program's post-mortem on the bill--and mandates.