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When I spoke to [Newsom] at the Orpheum in San Francisco on Friday, he zeroed in on healthcare and Obama's refusal to mandate that everyone somehow acquire health insurance. "'Universal' healthcare is crucial, and that's what makes it universal -- that's just fundamental," Newsom said.
Anyone who has been following California's health care reform bill might note an irony here. One of the real sticking points has been whether to force the uninsured to pay, and how. What are you going to do? Garnish poor people's wages on behalf of the insurance industry? Put a lien on their houses? Send them to jail? As Obama points out, people WANT insurance, but they can't afford it. Those of us without insurance choose our risks as best we can with limited resources. Many programs designed to expand availability, like COBRA, are often too costly to be attainable. So, we takes our chances. Rent versus premium.
Newsom and Clinton are more wrong than Obama here. By "more wrong" I mean that I agree that eventually we have to cobble together a system that does have some sort of mandate for individual coverage for everyone--including the healthy-wealthy. But as California is finding out, the tendency right now is to protect the insurance industry, protect employers and give them incentives, because they have the power-lobbies on this issue. An individual mandate in these conditions, without a single government payer, is pointed directly at those of us on the bottom. It would simply be a program to take money (particularly) from the lower-middle-class and give it to corporations and the wealthy.
