Two Ways on Health Care

Ezra Klein breaks down the shape of the health care debate:

On each side, the plans are basically united. The Republican plans make you pay more for your healthcare so you'll buy less. They do this by weakening the protection that insurance offers from health expenses. The Democratic plans bring everyone into the system, then use that leverage to reform the insurers and extract savings through efficiencies of scale.

This is why I do agree with Mark Kleiman that as far as domestic issues go, there's relatively little reason to focus on the fine-grained differences between the different candidates in the primary. If you're a liberal, the Democrats are all close enough to each other that the differences are bound to be swamped by the distance between what's proposed and what will actually come out of the legislative process. Much more important, as Mark says, to think about which candidate is likely to be most helpful (or least harmful) downballot or about who you trust most in the basically discretionary field of foreign policy.