Jon Cohn has a long exploration of the policy debate involved in how many people Obama's plan leaves uncovered. The answer is...we really don't know. It depends how strong the employment mandate is, how lavish the subsidies are, how much the plans cost, what's defined as the minimum coverage threshold, etc. Jon's conclusion is forthcoming, but mine basically remains: If you're not substantively striving for universality, you're not going to get universality. Too much will get bargained away. Additionally, you can't make the necessary reforms to the insurance market without putting everyone in the coverage pool. The point of the reforms is not merely to keep insurers from gaming consumers, but to keep consumers from gaming insurers. You can't have one without the other. And lastly, because he's not relying on a coverage mandate, Obama relies heavily -- more so than Edwards or Clinton -- on employer-provision. I'm not necessarily against channeling some insurance through employers, but further strengthening your reliance on that system seems like a tremendous mistake to me. This seems to me like a policy compromise that's searching for a rationale, and because various people want to support Obama, rationales are being constructed. The world is full of smart people who can think up smart reasons for not-so-smart things. But at the end of the day, even folks like Jacob Hacker, who are supportive of Obama's plan, had mandates in their plans. And even Obama, who is supportive of Obama's plan, has a mandate for kids in his plan. How you explain that in contrast to his attacks on a mandate for adults beats me. Obama could, of course, have come out and said that his sense of the political landscape was that a mandate wasn't popular enough, and would harm the chances for passage. But because he's made a big deal out of being bold and unbound by political considerations, he had to pretend that this was a decision made on the policy, rather than political, merits, and it's just not a very credible claim.
