NY Times News Analysis -- Public Option Fades From Debate Over Health Care

[Frank Booth]

WASHINGTON — It was just one line in a campaign manifesto, and it hardly seemed the most significant or contentious. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said he would “establish a new public insurance program” alongside private health care plans.

That proposal took on a life of its own, but it now appears to be dying, a victim of an ineffectual White House strategy, the president’s failure to argue passionately for the “public option” and all-out opposition by the insurance industry and much of the health care industry.

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Dancing around the issue for eight months, Mr. Obama has seemed, at various times, pragmatic, flexible or indecisive.

“I just want to figure out what works,” Mr. Obama said in March at a White House forum. If he could drive down health costs and expand coverage “entirely through the market,” he said, “I’d be happy to do it that way.” And “if there was a way of doing it that involved more government regulation and involvement, I’m happy to do it that way, as well,” he added.

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Liberal Democrats are not giving up. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said the president and Senate Democratic leaders had not made a serious effort to round up votes for a public option. If they did, he said, it could pass.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/health/policy/13plan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

"Ineffectual White House strategy" is well put, assuming this White House ever cared about an effective public option to begin with.

Now, rather than explicitly killing the public option, the Obama administration's letting it die a slow death. They're trying to lull those want real reform into complacency.

[cali]

1. You're quite right. Obama has been weak and ineffectual on healthcare reform

and the inclusion of a public option. And it's dying an ugly and slow death that makes the admin look all the weaker.

[Frank Booth]

4. The thing that pisses me off is that Obama's capable of doing a great job selling an idea,

and the public option should be a fairly easy sell. The insurance industry and the far right wing will never go for it, but if the White House had done it's job I think even the average Joe Blow could understand the importance of it.

The Dems should have been daring the right wing to filibuster an effective health care plan that would benefit 90% of the people in this country. Instead, we got ineffectual pandering to the "center".

[QC]

13. Maybe he doesn't want to sell this idea.

Maybe he's doing what the ancient Greeks used to do with unwanted children: "expose" them so that the kids would die but the parents could claim not to have killed them.

"Hey, I just hogtied the boy and left him on the mountaintop, but I didn't kill him or nothin'."

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Nikki Stone1]

2. This is what I am worried about

Thanks for posting this article.

[Luminous Animal]

3. Kick!

[Frank Booth]

5. I guess the issue of the number of Teabagger protesters has become more important

than the sell-out to the right wing.

[Nikki Stone1]

15. The teabag crowd is more theatrical and requires less thought

It's the easy topic of the day.

[area51]

6. Obama: "I just want to figure out what works,"

But we know what works, single-payer healthcare. And even if you don't like single-payer, there are countries which do use multiple insurers, but they are heavily regulated by the government so they don't kill people like they do in the U.S. due to our "carte blanche" attitide toward insurers. Obama and Congress made no effort to dialog with other countries to learn from their successes in making healthcare a basic human right, and accessible to all citizens.

[flyarm]

9. Yes, Obama Campaigned on a Public Option

http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/09/10/yes-obama-campaigned-on-a-public-option/

Yes, Obama Campaigned on a Public Option
By: Jane Hamsher

Thursday September 10, 2009 10:18 am

I'm not sure exactly what Chuck Todd is trying to prove here:

he speech also will be a failure if progressives -- Obama’s second audience tonight -- are still obsessing over the public option a week from now. We've said this before and we'll say it again: Obama never made the public option the focus of his health-care ideas, in the primaries or in general election. In fact, he never uttered the words "public option" or "public plan" in his big campaign speeches on health care. But there is no doubt that the public option has fired up the left, and how he sells them near-universal coverage and lower costs -- even if it means no public plan -- could very well be the trickiest part of tonight's speech.

From the Obama '08 campaign document, "Barack Obama's Plan for a Healthy America" (PDF):

The Obama plan both builds upon and improves our current insurance system, upon which most Americans continue to rely, and leaves Medicare intact for older and disabled Americans. The Obama plan also addresses the large gaps in coverage that leave 45 million Americans uninsured. Specifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees; (2) make available the National Health Insurance Exchange to help Americans and businesses that want to purchase private health insurance directly; (3) require all employers to contribute towards health coverage for their employees; (4) mandate all children have health care coverage; (5) expand Medicaid and SCHIP to cover more of the least well-off among us; and (6) allow state flexibility for state health reform plans.

I'm not quite sure how that jibes with "never made it the focus of his health care ideas," but YMMV.

But if the DC wags think that the base is going to get over its "fixation" on a public option in a week, I seriously doubt it. Here's Rasmusssen from yesterday:

One major challenge is that while most voters oppose the legislation with or without a so-called “public option, that option is essential to supporters. In fact, without the inclusion of a government-run health insurance company to compete with private insurers, enthusiasm for the reform plan collapses among Democrats.

Mind you the polling data is from mid-August, well before the speech, but I doubt he moved that needle much:

Without the public option, just 50% of Democrats support the legislation. That’s down from 69% support measured a week ago. But here the enthusiasm gap is especially strong. A week ago, polling found that 44% of Democrats Strongly favored the reform plan. Without the public option, just 12% of Democrats Strongly support it.

Instead, he's trying to exploit this:

A cautionary note should be issued on this topic: It’s likely that there is no common understanding of just what the public option is at this point in time.

Obama says he will include a public option in his health care plan, but stipulates that co-ops or triggers could satisfy his definition. But 179 members of Congress signed on to HCAN's health care principles, which explicitly define a "public option" as not co-ops or triggers. It's not going to be easy to walk that one back without completely demoralizing the base and potentially suppressing 2010 turnout just like the passage of NAFTA did in 2004.

[debbierlus]

10. Obama is selling out on health care reform.

And, until people will acknowledge this fact, we aren't going to have the momentum to fight back.

[Frank Booth]

11. Yeah, but he gives a great speech.

That makes it all OK, doesn't it?

[QC]

14. Well, he looks cute at the beach, too.

And then there were those pictures of him eating ice cream.

Next to those things, what's a little corporate sellout on a matter of life and death?

[kenny blankenship]

7. Single Payer -> Mandates+ Public Option w 130 M enrolled -> Public Option w ~10 M -> Triggers

Reform reformed into SCREWJOB

Both sides are engaged in a pretend shadow-play of negotiation, strung out over months, combined against our interest. First they get us to buy in, then they drag it out together in sham negotiations to wear us down. Repukes won't vote for the bill regardless, but Democrats keep "negotiating" with them in order to have an excuse to give things away to the insurance co.s. By the end, having trapped us in our partisan passions, while they whittle away and denature the legislation, they have us begging them to pass a bill that fucks us over.

Never let a good crisis go to waste! (Not when there's still a sliver of a chance of subverting reform and turning a dishonest dollar)

[Frank Booth]

17. The way this is going, I don't even thing we're going to get a trigger.

Seems like Baucus's (well, really, the insurance industry's) co-op idea is going to carry the day.

[flyarm]

8. Grijalva: Baucus Bill Has “No Legitimacy”

Grijalva: Baucus Bill Has “No Legitimacy”
By: Jane Hamsher

Sunday September 13, 2009 6:30 am

http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/09/12/grijalva-baucus-bill-has-no-legitimacy/

Amy Goodman asked Rep. Raul Grijalva, leader of the Progressive Resistance, what he thought about the Max Baucus bill crafted by former health insurance lobbyists:

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: I think the product that has come out from his committee and himself, I really believe that it has no legitimacy in this debate. It’s an insider product. It’s there to protect the industry. It is not there to try to look for that middle ground. He is key in holding up deliberations, has been key in trying to work on a consensus, but everything you see in his legislation had to be approved by the industry before it became part of the plan. So I don’t think it’s legitimate. I think we’re struggling with real issues in some of the other pieces of legislation from the House and even from the Health Committee. And that’s where the focus of the attention should be. I consider Senator Baucus’s proposal to be essentially an insider trader move to protect an industry and really doesn’t have validity at all, both political validity or content validity.

Rep. Grijalva is doing what we always ask progressives to do. While others stood by and watched Van Jones and Yosi Sergent and a huge piece of progressive infrastructure swept away by capitulation to Glenn Beck's McCarthyist tactics, he's fighting.

Let him know we need more of that.

[QC]

12. Gee, you would almost think it was planned this way,

if you had a nasty, suspicious mind, as anyone who follows politics at all should.

It's obvious to anyone but the Twirly-Eyed True Believers what's happening here.