The mandate for healthcare.

One more topic to consider if you're looking at the competing democrats: their plans for universal healthcare coverage.

At a rally I attended Friday night, Hillary Clinton said, "I'm for universal coverage because I wouldn't know who to leave out."

Paul Krugman in his New York Times column today, agrees that Clinton's plan is the most comprehensive:

Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.

Let’s talk about how the plans compare.

Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.

And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.