You (and the NYT) are demonstrably wrong. On every count.
Single payer universal health care is generally defined as 'Medicare For All', meaning a government fund collects and distributes money for health care.
Hillarycare actually was modeled on something developed by Stanford economist Alain Enthoven called 'managed competition'. It would have created exchanges like those included in the House and Senate bills, coupled with employer and individual mandates to ensure everyone got coverage. Everyone except those in the very largest businesses (10,000 plus employees) would've been forced to get coverage through the exchange (private insurance with premium caps and other government controls).
During the campaign, Obama supported "healthcare reform". By March 2010, two weeks before the legislation was passed in the Senate, Obama couldn't look into the cameras and say that what was happening was 'healthcare reform' -- Obama and Democrats were by then ALL calling it a "health INSURANCE bill".
Obama actually did campaign on single payer universal health care. In addition to the now infamous video clip from 2003 -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE - there's a campaign ad featuring Obama himself - http://www.factcheck.org/video/obama_motherwmv.wmv .
See the part where he says he has a plan to "cover everyone'? That's called "universal coverage". Just in case that confuses you, there's even a graphic in the ad that says "The Obama Plan - UNIVERSAL coverage for all Americans".
Here is another reference where Obama campaigned on a public option.
Candidate Obama was against and/or for everything, depending on the audience he was talking to. He was against mandates, and we all know how long that lasted. He was for single payer universal health care (unconditionally) before he was for it "theoretically". Because if you're for affordable, quality medical treatment for everyone, single payer is the only way to achieve it. Obama took single payer (Medicare For All) off the table, because if the goal is to get affordable quality medical care for all then everything else pales in comparison.
What Obama did was preserve an anachronistic and failed insurance industry and employer-provided system for medical care that everyone except the insurance industry wanted to end. It's government sanctioned racketeering.
Insurance adds NOTHING to the medical model. The insurance industry is the 'Don Fanucci' (Godfather, Part II) of medical care; the insurance industry is "wetting its beak", letting you get medical care (maybe, if you can afford the deductibles, the co-pays, and if your illness is covered by your policy, but) only if you pay them a gratuity up front.
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