I think Dean is right. What the conservatives are missing (and they are always 2 steps behind the curve) is that Obama doesn’t need a mandate if the government subsidizes healthcare plans. If you elect not to have coverage, that is your right, but under their plan, you will be forfeiting the subsidy that everyone else gets.
Dean is right in another sense...
Statist Marxists can destroy the civil society by overloading the system by many other means, as they are doing. On the other hand, health care CAN be reformed with real remedies such as tort reform, allowing hospitals to go after ER abusers and nonpayers, interstate insurance competition, SERIOUS deregulation, etc.
Even with Democrat control of both houses and of the presidency, the individual mandate was seen as the only viable funding mechanism.
Even with the individual mandate, lots of sweeteners -- some unrelated to health care or related only tangentially -- had to be tossed into the pot to secure enough votes to get the monster passed. There was a bit of discussion of that during Wednesday's oral argument at the Supreme Court as to what could be left standing if the individual mandate were held unconstitutional.
Others than Dean have also opined that a Supreme Court holding that the mandate is unconstitutional would help President Obama's campaign. A point that they miss is that such a decision this June, well before the election, would raise the specter of finding a way to allow the rest to survive without massive tax increases; an impossible task, I think. I don't that would help President Obama at all.