Senator Clinton may be politically cautious, but she does understand health care economics and she knows a good thing when she sees it.

The Edwards and Clinton plans as well as the slightly weaker but similar Obama plan achieve universal-or-near-universal coverage through a well-thought-out combination of insurance regulation, subsidies and public-private competition. These plans may disappoint advocates of a cleaner, simpler single-payer system. But it’s hard to see how Medicare for all could get through Congress any time in the near future, whereas Edwards-type plans offer a reasonable second best that you can actually envision being enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president just two years from now.

[ 21 September 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

The plan is to set up a government run health insurance plan that won't deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. The plan will allow Americans with private insurance to maintain this coverage rather than being covered under the public system. However, the plan will force every American to have health insurance. And because it's public health insurance rather than full fledged public health care, it will mean every American will be required by law to pay health care premiums.

Over 46 million Americans do not have health insurance. Sure, some of these Americans don't have health insurance because their health is so poor that no private insurance company will cover them. The Clinton plan will help these Americans, provided they can afford the insurance premiums. However, a large portion of the 46 million uninsured Americans are unisured not because of poor health, but because they simply can't afford health care premiums.

For poor Americans already stretching their meagre paychecks as far as they will go to be able to pay for food, rent and transportation, mandatory health care premiums represent a tax increase that they cannot afford. What will these Americans have to go without because of health care premiums? Adequate nutritious food? clothing? Rent? Transit fare?