You were better off when you tried to blame the forthcoming debacle on Max Baucus, you anti-progressive scumbag.

We all know we're getting an expansion of S-CHIP in the next Congress (if we're lucky), and nothing more.

You'll have the rest of your sleazy professional life to bemoan the effects, Ezra.

"some sort of mechanism that pulls folks into the pool is important,"

It wasn't important to anti-progressive scumbag Ezra Klein during the primary campaign, back when it would've mattered.

Why not start writing about how important it is to cover children, Ezra? General Electric won't object to that kinda bold stance. You might even get back on their teevee.

Trust fund scumbag! Trust fund!

The whole mandate thing in the primary was much ado about nothing. Whether the bill will have a mandate or not depends on whether a mandate can get 60 votes in the Senate not whether the President supports it.

Patel's individual mandate remarks were made in response to an insurance industry leader suggesting at the same forum that insurers will oppose Obama's plan as currently structured. Insurers are worried that the Illinois Democrat has not tied an individual mandate to "guaranteed issue," the industry's term for requiring patients to be covered without regard to pre-existing conditions.

So the insurer says, basically, if we want guaranteed issue, we have to give them mandates.

This would seem to confirm what many of us were saying, that mandates represent a concession to the center-right (whether reformers like Romney or the insurers Karen Ignagni represents) rather than a progressive goal in and of itself.

Of course mandates or something like them are necessary. But it doesn't make sense for our side to expend the political capital on something their side seems to want.

There's been quite a few post-primary disappointments with Obama (FISA, centrist advisors), so it's nice to know there's one front where he's not looking too bad.

Two thoughts:

Obama displayed a suspicion of mandates as far back as fall 2006 in an interview w/ Joe Klein (I think the quote was something along the lines of them not being "consumate with the American character" or some such thing), so perhaps it wasn't political calculation but, like the rape-death penalty ruling, a long-held belief

That being said, in that interview and many times thereafter, he's repeatedly said he'd be willing to revisit the mandate idea if mandate-less plan didn't work. So, the new rhetoric doesn't strike me as fundamentally different from previous rhetoric. Mandates, for Obama, are not ideal, but something he's willing to work with if they're necessary to make the system work or, seemingly, necessary to get the bill passed.

That jives with the "he's a pragmatist, not an idealogue" thing we've been talking about for some time now, and especially recently.

Add to that Neera Tanden's hiring as director of domestic policy and it does seem we are really going in that direction

Found the article. This is basically what he said throughout the primary, and doesn't clash at all w/ what his adviser is saying in Ezra's link:

Universal health insurance also found its way to the cutting-room floor. I asked about the universal plan recently passed in Massachusetts, which was a triumph of Obama-style bipartisanship. The plan requires everyone who earns three times the poverty rate to purchase health insurance and subsidizes those who earn less than that. Shouldn't health insurance be mandatory, like auto insurance, for those who can afford it? Obama wouldn't go there. "If there's a way of doing it voluntarily, that's more consonant with the American character," he said. "If you can't solve the problem without the government stepping in, that's when you make it mandatory."

Petey, you're nuts.

With universal catastrophic insurance, everyone would just be "covered" against devastating loss. No need for a "mandate" as such, except that insurance underneath the catastrophic umbrella should be mandatory for children (otherwise, they may be denied early necessary care). The one key rule necessary for the optional health insurance? If you, the insurance company, want to play in this market, no denial of coverage or discriminatory pricing for pre-existing conditions is allowed.

The Time article on the MA quoted above says:
"The plan requires everyone who earns three times the poverty rate to purchase health insurance and subsidizes those who earn less than that."

That's not true at all. Adults are required to buy coverage if they are offered a plan that meets the affordability standards. In MA, insurance prices vary based on age, constrained to a 2:1 ratio (most expensive no more than two times the cheapest).

Under the affordability schedule, young people just over 300% of poverty do have to buy a plan, but as you get older the income by which you're required to buy a plan goes up, fairly substantially. So 50-year olds aren't required to buy a plan until they make over 500% of poverty.