Many voters want mandatory insurance, employer role, yet candidates Differ (MarketWatch)
"Mandates make markets work better because they reduce the adverse selection risk significantly, and thereby enable you to do the kind of regulation the Democrats want to do to make the market fair," said Len Nichols, a health economist and director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Washington.

"There's a lot of stuff that doesn't hang together if you don't have mandates. It's not that I love mandates. It's that I want the damn system to work." The ambition and specificity of the candidates' health proposals stands out compared with previous elections in 2004, 2000, 1996 and even 1992, Nichols said.

"You really only had then, I would say, a few candidates who made this a big issue: [Paul] Tsongas and then [Bill] Clinton," he said. "The scale of effort is equal to or greater than '92."

On the Republican side, Nichols said Sen. John McCain presents a more "nuanced" health reform proposal than his counterparts by focusing on tax credits and cost control. "McCain does better than the other Republicans, but he doesn't do as well as even Obama on the Democratic side. They focus on the group-type market as opposed to the individual market. Once you in essence make the individual market as attractive in the tax sense as the group market, then you chase the healthy individuals out of the group." ...