You are unbelievably dishonest in your objections to mandates.

Mandates are not dead. You use your own diary as a "reference" and the article you cite there is from the Wall Street Journal -- as though the WSJ supports any sort of health care reform or universal coverage.

You know that any universal plan requires a mandate but you continue with your silly semantic games. If you really care about the health of your patients, you would want everyone to have coverage, no matter who's providing it. You continue with your "single-payer or bust" argument while the numbers of uninsured continue to climb. It's apparent that you care more about you group's political power than actually solving the very real problem of so many Americans lacking access to health care.

What do you think?

I agree with the idea of implementing a single payer system in this country. I believe it is inevitable. While I believe it will happen sooner or later, I'm afraid it will be later.

I will be eligible for Medicare in another 7 months. This issue isn't all that important to me personally, but it's still one of the most important to me politically. Even though I'm not worried about myself, I'm worried about the negative effect this is having on our country.

Subsidizing health care is an enormous burden on American corporations when competing against companies from other countries. In addition, the 30% the insurance industry takes from health care dollars depresses the level of care in this country. Something must be done.

I'm surprised at the number of people in here arguing that single-payer is a BAD idea.  As opposed to politically not feasible, etc.

Just because Hillary Clinton supported a different plan does not mean that you should suspend your own analysis.

We could easily come up with a plan that provides a decent compromise between leaving 47 million Americans uninsured and "massive give-aways to insurance companies".

Yes, we can do better than compromise -- we can do a strong negotiation with the commercial insurance industry to achieve a health insurance system that is corporate-based but nonprofit, as in Germany, like a well-regulated public utility.

Under Hillary's plan for universally mandated individual policies, the shoe yet to drop is that the insurance industry would reap a massive windfall profit when they sell millions of policies to relatively young/well consumers who will be forced to buy them. Rather than sandbag the US treasury to subsidize commercial insurance premiums, why not negotiate with the insurance industry, saying okay boys and girls, you can have this sweet deal but you have to keep your books open for quarterly public inspection and use the lion's share of the windfall profit to cover the low income margins, allowing a thin margin of profit across-the-board in all commercial health insurance transactions covering every American so the industry would still make an enormous fortune, just as public utilities do. Along with this insurers will comply with a reasonable system of consumer protections with caps on premiums, co-pays and deductibles controlled by an insurance commission, in essence creating a well-regulated public utility.

Should the commercial insurance industry refuse such a deal, we can simply say, okay, the American people are going to explore single payer and slide right on past you.

I'd like to see this kind of frame applied to the debate going forward. This turns the windfall profit from a universal mandate (forcing every American to buy a commercial insurance product) into an incentive for the insurance industry to negotiate with the government acting on behalf of the public so that the American people are not going begging and are instead in a strong negotiating position, offering a deal to the insurance industry that will make them a lot of money while also protecting the public interest, keeping insurance access costs down and creating a system that insures itself without leaning on the government (already in massive debt) to cover the low-income margins.

Personally I would prefer to see California's single payer bill SB 840 become law in this state and that might happen when we have an enlightened governor. But on a national level I'm realistic enough to see that many Americans are conditioned to wanting to keep a corporate role in their healthcare and the newsmedia, enmeshed with the corporate health insurance moneyworld, are not covering single payer in a popular way to educate the public on how it works, so the best bet in my mind is to take advantage of the universal mandate that Hillary put into play and play the mandate to our advantage in a high-stakes negotiation. Single payer is still out there, used as an implied threat to the corporate insurance business should they not cooperate with our deal.

I like the angle of not depending on government (for the most part, except for extreme handicapped and Social Security/Medicare already in operation) to bail out low income people and forcing commercial carriers to pull that load out of their windfall profit. This might have appeal to conservatives (it appeals to me as a progressive because I don't want government to be overwhelmed paying for commercial insurance premiums).

Too bad we don't have a strong presidential advocate to do this public negotiation I described (Hillary would have been the perfect advocate and I wonder if she had these ideas up her sleeve like a secret plan to unfold after the election). This negotiation would be dramatic and by definition it will carry within it the seeds of single payer which will always be back there as the ultimate alternative to creating this "public utility," so the newsmedia and everybody else will be forced to talk about single payer on the way to achieving this negotiated commercial public utility system.

From this perspective, California's single payer bill SB 840 (once it passes) becomes one of our negotiating chips on a national level. The advances made by single payer show commercial health insurers we have alternatives so it's in their interest to negotiate and not pull nasty tricks like Blue Cross's recissions. They will be forced to shape up or ship out.

   Sheila Kuehl is unfortunately termed out after this year. Who will be leading the fight in the Legislature. As one of her constituents, I think of Senator Kuehl as irreplaceable, but I know there are other good folks in the state Capitol. Has the new lead sponsor been lined up yet?