Obama is wrong on health care. In his effort to win the youth vote and industry support, he is selling car insurance, when he should be selling affordable medical care and health insurance.

Health insurance is like car insurance except that:

--The insured unit will be insured until it is destroyed.
--It will not be replaced by a newer, safer model after a period of years.
--Virtually every subscriber will need to file a claim at some point.
--There is no limit to the amount of damage and cost of repairs.

One of the basic motivators that an insurance salesman must use is fear. Notice the word "garnish" that Obama supporters use to scare themselves. Government taxes and fees are really not garnishment so much as taxes and fees for services that the government provides better than private companies. Evolution has proven that health insurance is one of those services.

Insurance companies add no value to the health care system. All they do is pay or refuse to pay health care providers. They profit more by kicking the health care can down the road in two senses:

-- they don't want us to realize that they are wasteful and unnecessary so they are lobbying against any hint of single-payer, and
-- they'd rather have a dead subscriber than a long suffering one, so they don't pay for preventive care and routine tests if they can avoid it.

In contrast, the US auto insurance companies have been instrumental in saving lives and dollars by fostering improvements in highways, laws and vehicles. They, unlike the health insurers, prefer safe drivers to dead ones.  Not because they are nice, but because it increases their profits.

Bottom line: The Edwards/Clinton plan could lead to a single-payer system. Obama has already conceded that the health insurance companies will be involved in designing the new system. His approach and his fear tactics are not progressive or liberal. They simply buy off the opposition, as the Republicans have been doing for years. This works for them because they are the opposition.

Barak's idea that everyone should have a place at the table is laudable and can be effective in many ways, as it has been in the past. But he shouldn't have tunnel vision. That approach isn't universally effective. If an industry is making a problem worse by its very existence, as with private health insurance, it doesn't need to be involved in designing a solution.