Healthcare reform – raw deal or New Deal?

At Salon, Michael Lind’s take is that it’s more raw deal. Hard to argue against that, between a 10-year phase-in, blocking Canadian drug imports and extending patent protections as not-so-cheap sops to Big Pharma and so forth.

Lind looks in more detail.

Back in 2001, (Ted) Halstead and I used the ideal of a portable, universal, citizen-based healthcare system as a criterion by which to evaluate different healthcare options. Five major alternatives to the present patchwork system had been discussed during the healthcare debates of the 1990s: single-payer; individual mandate; pay-or-play; a universal employer mandate; and health savings accounts. In practice there are only four options, because health savings accounts are a crackpot libertarian idea that would not work in practice.

He then says Congressional Democratic and Obama Administration plans are a hybrid of three of the four options, with some of the worst choices of each

Unfortunately, the Obama administration and Congress appear intent on giving us a version of pay-or-play, which, though it might solve some problems, from the point of view of advocates of a citizen-based social contract is the worst strategic option for healthcare.

without getting a lot closer to real healthcare portability, which stymies job flexibility.