> The Rep position on Medicare/Medicaid is try to get it to erode,
> though they pretended to support the contrary this past year, which
> will make things interesting for them later when they try to cut it.
>
> As for capital-friendly, why is it capital-friendly for uninsured
> people to buy health insurance instead of other stuff? I'd say a new,
> big Gov structure creates demands for subsidies in the future which
> threaten greater taxes on capital. It also opens the door to addition
> of a public option and the capital-unfriendly Jacob Hacker scenario.
> You could say it's capital friendly to provide an exit from
> employer-paid plans, but that would also be the case for a public
> option or single payer.
>
I think it's a mistake, in the present environment, to talk about whether some politically feasible government action would be capital-friendly or not. Presumably most ways of making things better for capital-as-a-whole have already been done, though there are always prominent exceptions - like the bailouts, which obviously could only happen after the bubble burst, and so on. The vast majority of (viable) political disagreements in any society will be those that pit one element of the ruling class against another. Some businesses would fare better under the Obama plan than the status quo; others the reverse.
(This isn't contradicting anything Max said; just expanding it into a more general reply to the question "is this capital-friendly?")