==Under their calculations, they cover everyone. One source said they fall short. And Obama haters
Posted by TeamJordan23
like you ran with that==
That is very interesting. I posted a thread about his health care plan and included the New Republic analysis of it. Guess what? No Obama supporter debunked the claims in the article. Few, if any, whined about the article. So if you have some information that debunks the TNR analysis please share it. In the article Obama's own advisers are not disputing the basic claim that his proposal is not truly universal...They simply say that under their rosy scenario (and we know how rosy scenarios by politicians often turn out!) they can cover 2/3 of the uninsured and promise to return to the issue and cover the remaining 1/3 after they are given the keys to the White House....
==But there are some differences between what Obama and Edwards have proposed. And by far the biggest, most important one is the fact that Edwards has a "mandate" in his plan: He would require every single American to get insurance. That means his plan is truly "universal." Obama says he, too, is committed to covering everybody by 2012. And he has a mandate that all children get insurance. But there is no similar mandate on adults. There is, in other words, no requirement that every adult American have health insurance. And that means his plan is not universal--at least not in the same sense that Edwards and his advisers mean it.
Why does this matter? Obama's advisers, for what it's worth, think it doesn't. Not much, anyway.
They believe that their initiative will help cover most Americans within two or three years. After that, they say, they can come back to the problem and, following through on Obama's promise, cover that relatively small portion of the population that still doesn't have coverage. If that requires passing some sort of mandate then, so be it. They're prepared to do so.
I think they mean it. But can they do it?
The best studies out there--by Urban Institute researchers, the RAND Corporation, and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber--suggest that, without a mandate, improving affordability will cover roughly one-third of the people who don't have coverage. Mandating that kids (but not adults) have coverage bumps that up to about a half. Obama's advisers think that, by really loading up on the subsidies--and making enrollment a lot easier by, for example, having an automatic enrollment with voluntary opt-out at your place of work--they can goose that up to two-thirds. But that's getting optimistic--and, even then, you still have around 15 million people who are uninsured.In other words, the "mop-up" job at the end would quite likely be more than a mop-up. It'd be a substantial task, maybe even a huge one. That's why most health care experts believe you can't get that close to universal coverage without some sort of a mandate.==
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070528&s=cohn053107
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