Today, Sen. Hillary Clinton lambasted Sen. Barack Obama for insinuating, through campaign mailers, that Hillary's healthcare plan will be mandatory and will punish people who don't join. "Sen. Obama knows it is not true that my plan forces people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it," she said today.

So, are these allegations true or false? Hillary appeared on This Week on Feb. 3. Even then, the Obama campaign was telling people that Hillary's healthcare plan would force people to purchase insurance. Host George Stephanopolous asked Hillary to answer these charges:

Stephanopolous: "They're claiming this issue of the penalty, and a lot of healthcare experts, many who side-- who worked with you in 1994, say that without these enforcement mechanisms, you simply can't get to universal coverage, you can't claim to have universal coverage, so there's no difference between your plan and Senator Obama's, and, and, and, I mean, you talk about automatic enrollment. Will you garnish wages of people who, uh, don't comply, don't buy the insurance?"

Hillary: "George, we will have an enforcement mechanism. Whether it's that or it's some other, uh, mechanism through the tax system or automatic enrollment--"

In what way do the words "whether it's that [meaning garnishing wages] or some other mechanism" not translate into forcing people to buy insurance? And incidentally, this controversy has been around since the beginning of February. Only now is Hillary drawing new attention to it as she tries -- desperately, I might add -- to win Ohio and Texas on Mar. 4.