Are Clinton and Obama adopting versions of Nixon's 1971 health care plan?

[SOS]

Two Harvard doctors point out that the "reforms" proposed in the current race are proven failures:

I Am Not a Health Reform (New York Times 12/07)

By DAVID U. HIMMELSTEIN and STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER
Cambridge, Mass. (edited and updated, full article at link)

"IN 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying premiums based on their income.
Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.

(Edit: Himmelstein and Woolhandler detail the failures in MA, OR, MN, TN and VT, see link for details)

As governor, Mitt Romney tweaked the Nixon formula in 2006: employers that do not offer health coverage face only paltry fines, but fines on uninsured individuals will escalate to about $2,000 in 2008. Yet even under threat of fines, only 7 percent of the 244,000 uninsured people in the state who are required to buy unsubsidized coverage had signed up by Dec. 1. Few can afford the sky-high premiums.

The “mandate model” for reform rests on impeccable political logic: avoid challenging insurance firms’ stranglehold on health care. But it is economic nonsense. The reliance on private insurers makes universal coverage unaffordable.

Only a single-payer system of national health care can save what we estimate is the $350 billion wasted annually on medical bureaucracy and redirect those funds to expanded coverage.
In 1971, New Brunswick became the last Canadian province to institute that nation’s single-payer plan. Back then, the relative merits of single-payer versus Nixon’s mandate were debatable. Almost four decades later, the debate should be over. How sad that the leading Democrats are still kicking around Nixon’s discredited ideas for health reform."

David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are professors of medicine at Harvard and the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/opinion/15woolhandler.html

With or without mandates, we're not getting national health care.

[jaysunb]

1. At least Nixon addressed the problem

leaving a template that should have long ago been refined and implemented.