UPDATE 1 Life insurance actuary explains issues, agrees with Krugman. What a surprise.*

UPDATE 2 Krugman eviscerates Dean Baker, Obama surrogate.

Obama, genius orator, shot himself in the foot with his right wing Harry & Louise ads. Read on.

Krugman:

The big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.

An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else.

So, Obama's plan, despite the oratory, won't be universal in practice, and doesn't take account of free riders (which the Republicans will love).

So, in response to criticism by Krugman and health care experts, Obama's trying to fix his plan:

Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.

Do the math. What's the cost of Obama's plan versus Clinton's?

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?

To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness.

And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.

Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.

But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

Obama shot himself in the foot by using right wing talking points. Which is only to be expected, because right wing talking points, by design, are poison pills to progressive policies.

Naturally, to the OFB, it's Krugman is just a h8er. Because hate is the only reason not to support He Who Is The One, Obama.

Sigh.

NOTE Drum Quaffs deep:

Conversely, today's Paul Krugman column, which was yet another installment in his months-long anti-Obama jihad had the opposite effect. I don't like Obama's mini-demagoguery of Hillary's healthcare plan either, but for chrissake, it's an election. A bit of hardball is to be expected and I can't for the life of me figure out what Obama has done to drive a sensible guy like Krugman over a cliff.

Gee, maybe it's numbers that don't add up, and bad plan, just like it was when Bush's tax policy "drove Krugman off a cliff." Of course, 2002 was "an election." Good God. And it's not like Krugman doesn't have a track record; in fact, he has a very good one.

What is it about Obama that causes believers to resort to the claim that anybody who questions him has no intellectual honesty? We hear it over and over again from the OFB, but Jeebus, I expect better from Kevin. Good God. I am voting for Hillary. This is insane.

UPDATE Again:

I'm an actuary for a life insurance company. My father is a health economist, and has been working on universal health care for some time. So I have a little experience on this issue.

Just think of Social Security or Medicare Part A (the Hospital Insurance). Both programs are mandatory; everyone must contribute in the form of payroll taxes. Not everyone, however, benefits. If you aren't lucky enough to live to 65, or are unfortunate enough either to become disabled, or have a parent or spouse whose income you depend upon die premturely, you don't get Social Security and/or Medicare benefits. That's just the way insurance works. Insurance isn't an investment policy; it's a policy to guard you against catastrophic losses.

Now would Hillary Clinton's mandate force people into private insurance plans? Yes, everyone would be forced to purchase private insurance, and everyone would be allowed to buy into the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). In my previous life as an economist for the Commerce Department, I had the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Standard Option, of the Federal Employee (FEHBP) plan. Contrary to what many people say on this blog, the plan is actually quite nice. But here's the bigger thing: by allowing everyone to buy into FEHBP (as Obama's plan also does), people would be able to have their insurance independent of their work. That way, when people change jobs, they don't have to worry about what health insurance benefits they may have to lose.

I hope this diary clears up many of the misconceptions about the mandates debate.

Could it be that Krugman is taking issue with Obama's policy proposals?!?!? Nah. It's all about being a h8r....