David Sirota, Health Care, the Great Compromise
Over at OpenLeft, in a piece called, Negotiations and Swan Songs, David Sirota makes a case for why negotiations in congress should have begun with Single-payer to give us bargaining power. Instead, we started out using our compromise position, to then be compromised away by the Republicans and Blue Dogs to bring us to the “Point of No Reform”.
Mike Lillis has an important story over at the Washington Independent reiterating a theme we’ve been talking about for months here at OpenLeft: Namely, that one of the major problems in the health care debate was the Democratic Party’s insistence on - and D.C. progressive community’s complicity in - beginning the health care battle from a position of weakness. Specifically, the Professional Left (as distinct from the activist/grassroots/local left) began the fight not by pushing President Obama to stand by his previous single-payer promises of the past, but by pushing the compromise public option:
By choosing the public option - not single payer - as the left-most negotiating point, Democrats left themselves with few places to go but toward more conservative proposals for insurance reform, experts say, including the co-op model and a system of triggering public plans only if private insurers fail to meet certain cost and coverage targets. In the blood sport of congressional negotiating - which dictates that you over-ask, and then move toward your goal during the subsequent bartering - Democrats were asking merely for the public plan they wanted in the final bill. The move, some experts say, provided Republicans with greater leverage to fight the public option.
[snip]
The X-factor will be President Obama. Can he muster an LBJ-esque burst of legislative arm-twisting to pass a real bill with a real public option? Or will be continue to court a Republican Party that he doesn’t need, while defending a handful of conservadems he should be able to roll? If it’s the latter, its a good bet this will be his legislative swan song, as the Congress will feel emboldened to ignore/water down the rest of his agenda for the rest of his term.
The Single-Payer discussion was an important one to have. Missed opportunities.
Related posts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lHgbbM9pu4
The Romulan can be Orly Taitz OR the left wing, depending on which birth certificate you’re talking about.