To Mandate, Or Not to Mandate

All of this intraparty sniping between the Democrats on health care is pretty amusing. Here’s the New York Times on the most recent skirmish:

[Clinton] whacked Senator Barack Obama again – this time by name – over his health insurance plan and the estimates that it would not cover about 15 million Americans.

“It’s been kind of confusing following his description of his own plan,” Mrs. Clinton said. “If you go back and look, he said it was universal, he said it was sort of universal, he said it wasn’t universal, he said it covered everybody, he said he didn’t cover 15 million, he has a mandate for kids, now he’s against mandates. I think you’re going to have to ask him what his plan actually does.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton refused, again, to answer how she would enforce a centerpiece of her health insurance plan – the mandate that all Americans must have health care, which is the key difference between her proposal and Mr. Obama’s. (Former Senator John Edwards, who laid out his health plan before the other two, calls for an individual mandate that is similar to Mrs. Clinton’s.)

“There are a variety ways of doing it, and I’m going to negotiate with the Congress over that, because different people in the Congress have different approaches about how to do that,” she said. Referring to her failed health care reform effort in the Clinton administration, she continued, “One of the lessons I learned from ‘93 and ‘94 is that the President and the Congress have to work together from the very beginning, I will have certain principles that have to be addressed – one of them is shared responsibility.”
Asked how she can criticize Mr. Obama’s plan for lacking a mandate when she will not say how she would enforce a mandate for her own plan, she said: “If you start out without mandates, you start out from a position where you’ve given away one of the strongest arguments you have in dealing with the Congress.”

“I think I start from a position where I solve the problem and he doesn’t,” she added.

That’s pure Clintonian nothingspeak — essentially, "I’m going to solve the problem because I’m going to solve it," but completely refusing to say how while trying to use her "resolve" as a political mace to beat up on an opponent. Of course, it really doesn’t matter what she wants to do to enforce the mandate, as all evidence suggests that there’s absolutely nothing that will work. Romney’s Massachusetts mandate has been a failure, unable to get people to follow its mandate. And, as a general rule, mandates not only don’t work, but don’t even address the problems that they’re supposed to. Not, however, that I expect universal health care advocates to recognize any of this, or stop much of their squabbling.