The whole dustup this weekend over mandates and affordability in health care between Clinton and Obama just begs the question-- are we really going to impose a mandate to buy health care on working people if it's not affordable, and if health care is truly affordable, do people think any but a small group will not get coverage? 

The key issue is what counts as "affordable" health care, and it's not just cheap premiums, since "cheap" insurance just means large numbers of people go bankrupt in out-of-pocket expenses.  It happens that Progressive States released a new policy brief, Individual Health Care Mandates and the Problem of Affordability, last week which emphasized that before you even talk about applying a mandate, we all need a real definition of affordability-- and a number of state governments are starting to develop a decent working definition that might get us past the whole conflict of mandates versus affordability altogether.

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