It's true that there's a great deal of misogyny responding to Clinton's campaign. And there is a disturbing way that this misogyny is very open and widely accepted, whereas racial prejudice against Obama cannot be. But at the same time, there are ways that prejudice operates against Obama as well.

Clinton supporters very often point out that Obama is still a man. He is in this way often referred to as a "black man" and therefore gendered, in order to downplay the relevance of his candidacy. That is, people assert, he may be a black candidate, but he's still a man.

In contrast, Clinton is rarely referred to as a "white woman," she is simply a "woman candidate." She does not get raced, in the way Obama gets gendered. There is very little of the attitude, well she may be a woman but she's still a white candidate. As usual, whiteness is allowed to fade into the background and allowed to appear neutral and not a relevant factor when evaluating the Clinton candidacy.

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I'm an Obama supporter, not least of all for the reason that, regardless of the differences between Obama and Clinton's healthcare plan, I think Obama will be much more likely to create the political atmosphere in which any plan can get passed.

That said, having talked to a number of public policy experts, I think the Clinton plan is clearly superior, precisely because of the mandate. The mandate question has nothing to do with universal healthcare. The question of universality is a red herring trumped up by Clinton to win political points.

The importance of the mandate is rather that it ensures that the cost of healthcare is evenly spread out over the entire populous. After all, the whole principle of insurance in general is to share risk. So the reason 15 million people will opt out is not because they're gaming the system, it's because they don't think they need health insurance or, in other words, because of what's called adverse selection.

Adverse selection is an empircally verified phenomenon that occurs with insurance, wherein the people most likely to incur losses are the ones most likely to buy insurance. So, in the case of health insurance, if you don't have an indvidual mandate many young and/or healthy people won't buy insurance and won't be cross subsidizing the old, sick and poor. You basically have to force everybody into the insurance pool to keep the per person cost of insurance down. If the per person cost of insurance becomes too high, the associated tax increases required to cover the extra net costs of the insurance outlays would be too large and likely become politically infeasible.

Another benefit of the mandate is that people with health insurance are likely to seek preventative care in the early stages of illness and that people without insurance wait too long to address problems and end up having costly and inefficent emergency room visits. You want to force everyone to have insurance to encourage earlier preventative medical intervention---even for the young and healthy---thereby reducing the total cost born by society of achieving a given level of health outcomes.

So the mandate may not seem superficially like a big deal, but it may well be the difference between whether a system like this works or not.

What's more, the idea that Clinton is taking the "riskier" strategy is wrong. We should not forget that Massachusetts already has a healthcare system like this and it was the Republican Governor in 2006, Mitt Romney, who insisted on the mandate. Likewise, in California's failed attempt to institute this sort of healthcare system, it was Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who wanted the mandate and the "liberal" Democrats who worried that it would be too much of a financial burden on middle and low income people.

Why do the Republicans like the mandate? Because they see it as usage fee (as opposed to a tax) which will catch cheaters. The Republicans are very often in favor of essentially regressive fees, as opposed to progressive income and property taxes. But in this case, the Republicans (and Clinton) are probably right that it's what such a healthcare system would need.

Still, in this whole debate, we should not forget that both Clinton and Obama's proposals are political devices being deployed in a election to persuade voters. When it comes to actual law, this is all going to be changed and negotiated heavily by Congress, if it even passes. So it's silly to assume that Clinton will definitely be able to get the mandate through or that Obama won't end up letting the Republicans put it back in. The important thing is that they both go to bat for this issue.

Per my last post, of course true Universal Healthcare would also solve the adverse selection problem. (That is a single payer system administered by the government, as opposed to state subsidized health insurance set up in competition with private health insurance, which is what both Clinton and Obama are proposing.)

I wasn't advocating for Clinton's system, I was just explaining the logic behind it.

"Cheaters" is not my word. It's the word Republicans use to describe those who want to opt out of health insurance systems like this. So I used the word to characterize the Republican/conservative attitude about these sorts of usage fees.

Also, the public policy professionals I know are all liberal Democrats, must of whom work at fairly low pay for non-profits.