Health Care Reform, what DOES Obama want?
I wrote, a couple of days ago about Eric Massa’s phone interview on the Bill Press Show . In that piece, I posited that perhaps the president and his administration were not exactly on board with a strong public option, or even a weak public option (for which I was taken to task in the comments). Massa, who is ensconced in the health care debate, had made the observation that the president was being very vague on what he would accept in a health care reform bill.
Scarecrow, over at Fire Dog Lake has written a much more extensive treatise on the issue and has drawn the same sort of conclusion.
Night after night, we are reminded (thanks to Nancy Pelosi prodding CBO) that a strong public option will save tens of billions, give consumers a choice in an industry that is dangerously concentrated and lacking in competition, and put pressure on insurers to lower premiums in the face of their promises/threats to raise them. Everyone now realizes a strong public plan could provide a credible, government-guaranteed alternative even if the private insurers succeed in evading new government regulations banning their most outrageous practices — practices whose evil effects we see repeated on a daily basis. So what’s the problem?
The Beltway conventional wisdom, steeped in cynicism, is that the White House is being disingenuous when it repeatedly says the President supports a public option. WH officials claim Obama believes it is “the best way” to provide an affordable choice and reduce costs. But then why is he not working to get it adopted in the Senate, and explicitly directing his OFA troops to help that effort? Why has he ducked every opportunity to make even the logical argument that the burden is on detractors to show there’s a better measure? No one has seriously attempted such a case.
Hmmmm, interesting. Why has this case not been made? We’ve got the votes to move a public option through the senate, but Reid acts like there’s a chance it won’t pass, that the Republicans might filibuster, that it’s just too close to call.
Why should we not also believe that the White House has a deal to shield insurers from competition by preventing the creation of a public option in exchange for the insurers agreeing to reforms on guaranteed issue and limited community ratings (with the flexibility Baucus provided) and to support this framework with tv ads? (Read Ignagni’s WaPo op-ed today; while defending the PwC study, she says they made a deal, but Baucus broke it; she didn’t say the deal’s off.)
The White House isn’t taking up most of the chairs in Harry’s Reid’s meetings just to watch him make decisions on his own. They’re there to make sure Harry Reid doesn’t undo the White House deals and wander off the reservation.
This is what I think: our president does not want a public option in the final bill, but he also doesn’t want to be seen as “the one who let it get away”.
I believe Massa knows this, but is not a position to verbalize it quite as succinctly.
I hope I’m wrong.
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I hope you’re wrong too but the actions of many groups are puzzling. Why did OFA, SEIU and all the other groups throw in the towel on Medicare for all before the fight began? They all need to step up now and change their positions loudly and publicly. It was frustrating listening to representatives of these groups instruct people to ask their rep in congress, nicely, and politely, to support health care reform. Nothing specific, just some vague reform with unknown benefits and consequences. The herd mentality around this is hard to take. We could lose it all to corporate interests. It makes me wonder if those same corporate interests had influence with the groups who refused to stand for Medicare for all.
Good point. Could it be that a deal has been arranged, We’ll give you your nebulous public option and you give us the Employee Free Choice Act?