WHICH OBAMA, DO YOU BELIEVE, WHEN IT COMES TO OBAMACARE??!!

When the Republicans first proposed it in the 90s, they were right. The individual mandate is necessary to keep the cost of health-care insurance from slowly spiraling to levels that nobody can afford. When Hillary ran on the idea in the campaign, she was right. And when incumbent Obama embraced it in Affordable Care Act, that was the right thing to do as well.

If you don't have an individual mandate, the youngest, healthiest people will largely opt out; betting the won't need health care and saving the cost. Insurance premiums just keep soaring because the higher they get, the more only the truly ill buy into the system. Insurers are forced to turn to lifetime caps, exclusion of all pre-existing conditions, and dropping subscribers who become seriously ill to avoid bankruptcy. As more and more people lose coverage, costs of unpaid visits to emergency rooms (the only avenue open to the uninsured) keep climbing, and get passed on to all who are still paying into the system. It is a plan that is doomed to fail.

The real fix is to abandon private healthcare insurance as a primary solution and go to a national single-payer coverage -- Medicare for everyone. Those who want additional benefits would still be free to buy specialized coverage like Aflac offers to pay bills while one is incapacitated; but everyone would have their basic health care needs covered; and the healthy along with the infirm would all pay into supporting the system. This would take the expense of heath insurance off of American businesses, as well. That would be a huge help in making our corporations competitive on the world market. No other country on Earth expects their businesses to bear the cost, or a substantial part of the cost, of insuring their employees.