Paul Krugman has an op-ed column today discussing Obama's health plan. He describes the plan and compares it (unfavorably) to Edward's and Clinton's plans. Krugman is arguing whether the candidates' health plans require/mandate the purchase of health insurance. The difference in the Dem candidates' positions is how to provide health insurance.
This is the wrong question. The base of the problem we have in the US is about providing access to proper health CARE.
Private health insurance companies aren't providing their existing customers with access to adequate health care. If you require everyone to pay for health insurance, that does nothing to change the dynamic of getting good health care. It just enriches private health insurance companies.
We can require everyone to pump money into health insurance companies. But unless we follow up by:
reigning in obscene profits by health insurance companies
regulate policies that deny appropriate care
address underfunding of health infrastructure like hospitals, clinics, and providers
stop propping up drug company profits and negotiate lower drug pricing
or else there will be no improvement. Or we could just go to single payer, government provided health care, like most other sane countries in the world.
This issue is a lot like the immigration debate. The candidates are poking around the edges of the problem and not fixing the root cause. We have millions more illegal immigrants now than we did after the amnesty in the 1980's because we didn't follow up the amnesty program by enforcing our borders and penalizing employers hiring illegal workers.
Similarly for the health issue, we can have most everyone enrolled in some insurance plan, but unless you make the insurance plan provide adequate health CARE, you haven't solved anything at all.