Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
The nuance is that she proposes that the government pay COBRA health insurance premiums to the insurance industry for newly unemployed people rather than cutting them out and providing direct coverage without a profiteering middleman. Those are some of her biggest donors after the military industry. Her scheme also does nothing for anybody not facing COBRA, which is a system that allows laid off workers to pay their former employer's share of health insurance premiums.

It is no accident that she has accumulated over $100M in personal wealth since first taking office. Influence peddling can do that for you.
The US health care industry is the largest lobbying group in the country, taken as an aggregate (it's not just one thing). There is bipartisan reluctance to go against the interests there, hence the watered down health care bills we end up with. I don't really like that idea, either, but I do recognize that it is the path of least resistance. If the goal is to get the job done, I can see the point in taking that approach at the moment, rather than fighting against the grain. Providing direct coverage would be vigorously opposed by lots of groups, including most of Congress, for various reasons. Personally, I don't see how that would work. Seems like it would involve creating a lot of work identifying people to get the money to, which would have other knock-on effects. However, I'm not all that familiar with COBRA. I only know that they are the perennial opponents of G. I. Joe, and I don't know why we are paying their health insurance premiums in the first place.