debate

Yesterday, when I was watching the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate I noticed that there was a significant number of Californian's questions that were selected to be asked of the candidates. Out of the 38 questions that were asked, eight came from Californians. No other state even came close to matching that total. Minnesota, Michigan, South Carolina and Pennsylvania had two each. The rest were single digits and two came from unknown locations.

Everyone in the country was eligible to submit a question. A state by state breakdown of the origin of all of the 2,000+ questioners is impossible to find, since we only know user names. However, during the debate they listed the hometown of almost all. So we can't know if this was a representative sample of the questions asked. Regardless, it is great to see so many Californians get a chance to ask the candidates questions during the debate. Wouldn't it be ironic if there were more CA questions asked during this debate than the one in LA?

Below the fold are the Californian questions and the name and hometown of the questioner.

During last night's debate the Democrats had an in-depth back and forth discussion on health care reform. You can watch the video below, but I would like to focus on two specific sub-topics, universality and how we pay for the needed reforms.

John Edwards directly addressed the lack of an individual mandate in Barack Obama's plan and Obama responded.

On this issue of mandatory and non-mandatory. People are not going around trying to avoid buying health care coverage. And in fact if you look at auto insurance, in California there is mandatory auto insurance. 25% of the folks don't have it. The reason is because they can't afford it.

So, John and I we are not that different in this sense that I am committed to starting the process. Everybody who want it can buy it and it is affordable. If we have some gaps that are remaining, we will work on that. You take it from the opposite direction, but you are still going to have some folks who are not insured under your plan John. Because some of them will not be able to some of them will simply not be able to be able to afford to buy the coverage that they are offered.

Obama is correct. No matter what we do, short of passing a single payer plan there will be people who will not be covered. There will be a percentage of the population that subject themselves to the punitive effects of Edward's proposal. It certainly should be much smaller than 25%, given that it is the less well off who often go without car insurance. That same population would have access to care in both Edwards and Obama's plans.