It's Time to Bite the Public-Option Bullet

[natrat]

P.M. Carpenter


The evidence keeps piling up; virtually all that voters care about these days -- which is to say, worry about -- is the economy. And that means jobs.

Those without them reached the official mark of 10.2 percent last week -- the highest level of unemployment in more than a quarter-century -- while the unofficial casualties have climbed to 17.5 percent, probably the worst since the Great Depression.

These are what you might loosely call the base numbers behind what Democratic pollster Peter Hart, speaking yesterday morning on CNN's "State of the Union," pointedly called the electorate's "disgust" at Washington. "You have to do something to get people back to work," he said, with noted exasperation, "otherwise Democrats and incumbents are going to be in trouble" in 2010.

After similarly observing America's "bad mood" of joblessness, Paul Krugman remarked last Thursday that "the stimulus bill fell far short of what many economists ... considered appropriate. According to The New Yorker, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a package of more than $1.2 trillion was justified.... more is needed the stimulus has already had its maximum effect on growth."

On the preceding Monday, Krugman had again evangelized from the rather crowded Keynesian pulpit: "The good news is that ... the Obama stimulus plan is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But ... the same textbook analysis says that the stimulus was far too small given the scale of our economic problems.... e need a lot more federal spending on job creation.... We now know that stimulus works, but we aren’t doing nearly enough of it."

The aforementioned came just 24 hours before election-determining independents slammed Democrats to the mat across two critical states. The morning after, in cable-network interviews, there were numerous sightings of Democratic self-reproach. Liberal Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for example, appeared on MSNBC and limited her remarks about "lessons learned" from the elections to the economy alone. Yesterday, on CBS' "Face the Nation," Schultz was back, saying again that "that we need to focus on the economy."

Virginia's Democratic Sen. Jim Webb tutored with characteristic bluntness that "people up here on our side need to get their message straighter," and his homestate colleague, Mark Warner, in even blunter juxtaposition to Nancy Pelosi's prodigiously out-of-body, post-election observation that "We won last night," said, simply, "We got walloped."

In topical summation, let us revert to pollster Peter Hart, from yesterday: In 2010, he said, "I don't think people will be voting on health care."

Everyone, it seems -- from pollsters to White House advisers to liberal Congresswomen to moderate Democratic senators to prominent macroeconomists -- "gets it": The Number One issue among the electorate, by leaps, bounds, and parsecs, is jobs and job creation.

Something needs to be done and done now, as Hart noted, about jobs, jobs, jobs, because, as Krugman further observed, "Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment."

So, what did the United States House of Representatives spend an entire and entirely rare work-Saturday doing, just in time for the Sunday-newspaper headlines and all the Sunday talk shows for all the increasingly jobless electorate to see?

Why of course -- it spent the day passing a health-care bill inclusive of a public option which is going absolutely nowhere in the United States Senate.

Look, way back in ancient times, when this health-care bill saw its genesis, no one was more supportive of a public option than I. In fact, I would have preferred to see the proposal of single-payer, but of course that was political unfeasible. But as it turns out, so, too, is a genuine public option. It simply is not going to happen; even the liberal House couldn't gather the necessary votes for a "robust" public option, and if it takes any form at all in the Senate, you won't recognize it.

It's time to kiss this thing goodnight and put it to bed. Strip it -- strip it completely from the bill and merely work to ensure mandates and thus the risk-spreading elimination of pre-existing-condition denials and annual caps and the like and just wrap this damn thing up.

Then work on a jobs bill. Immediately. Before Christmas and as a national Christmas present, or at the very least, a New Year's gift.

A quite possible result in one year? An employed electorate just might return a more progressive Congress to power, at which point maybe a genuine pubic option could be passed.

Who knows. That's a long way off. But one thing is for sure: If this Democratic Congress continues to toy with a health-care bill that the public has lost interest in and that the Senate is in no way going to pass and that is consuming time otherwise spent on a jobs-creation bill, well, a public option will be the least of this Congress' worries.


http://blog.buzzflash.com/carpenter/540

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. there's always money for war but not for jobs and healthcare

nobody mentions how much we are spending on war

[yurbud]

2. good analysis that came to the exact opposite conclusion of the evidence presented

if people are worried about joblessness, one thing that would put their mind at ease is decoupling insurance from work and the worry that if they have to take a shit job temporarily, they won't have insurance for their family.