health care reform miasma
Image found at Shah Baba’s photostream
This health care thing is driving me nuts.
I honestly don’t know who is accurate or not anymore. For every post you put up about the death of the public option, someone else who i respect just as much is saying the exact opposite.
Reconciliation is going to be complicated as we have to figure out what goes in the budget process and what doesn’t.
But the stuff that doesn’t–regulations on insurance companies and the individual mandate, for example–are broadly popular. It will be hard for Ds and even some Rs to vote against it. 60 votes won’t be all that hard to reach.
Sam is right that the public option clearly reduces costs and we need to keep them down to meet the five year budget plan under reconciliation. So that will help build support for the public option.
Any there are 44 firm public votes for it and another five or six who say they will vote for it privately and of the remaining 8 or 9 Ds are many usually progressive members.
Stier adds further down in comments:
Single payer would have been a weak opening hand because it would have been opposed by a majority of the country and a majority of Democrats.
What killed health care reform in 94 was all the people who have private health insuance (90% of voters) and who like it (80%) in part because they don’t know how bad it is.
But over 75% of the country likes choice and competition…and that makes the Obama proposal a powerful force that created a majority in the House and will do so in the Senate.
It’s never really been about negotiating with insurance companies or Republicans.
On the other side are people like Jane Hamsher, someone i also respect a great deal (and not for nothing: she’s been incredibly accurate about a lot of stuff). Hers is a very different narrative: the WH has sold us out, and is throwing us under the bus.
The White House cuts the public option loose in a trial balloon in Politico…
Of course he’s not going to include a public option — as DC’s beltway class well knows, it’s been gone for a long time. Those who deluded themselves into thinking he would veto a bill that didn’t have one were — well, deluded. Rahm and the Baucus Caucus dealt the public option away months ago in order to keep stakeholers at the negotiating tables, and from filling the coffers of Republicans in 2010.
The Blue Dogs (whose votes have been whipped by the White House who told them there will be no public plan) will make the House bill conform to whatever comes out of the Senate.
The White House is making the calculation that the hit they suffer when they drop the public plan is only with the “far left,” that they can survive that and actually use it to their advantage by triangulating against “the blogs.”
I am literally 100% confused by the whole thing, totally spun out. As I mentioned to a friend in an email earlier today, at least with Bush you knew whatever came out of his mouth was utter bullshit. With these Democrats, it’s like trying to catch an eel in a sea of vaseline while wearing rubber gloves that have been dipped in olive oil. I find myself trying to make sense of it (”Maybe max baucus is doing all this dumbfuckery in a strategy to drive the GOP into a corner, paving the way for reconciliation… but wait, he’s owned by the health care industry… oh, BUT he also…”)
It’s maddening. You can’t make heads or tails of it. I am SO tired of writing uninformed chicken little pieces that the sky is falling on health care reform (no matter how much the realist in me tells me this is probably the case), but at the same time I find it difficult to believe in the marginally positive theme emerging from people like Marc.
One thing I DO know: I am tiredd, sick to death really, of feeling like a pawn on Obama’s 12-dimensional game of chess.
And one other thing I know: I will not vote for Democrats again if there is no public option. Here’s Jane again, speaking for me:
It’s just a guess, but when average Americans understand that “health care reform” means they will be forced to pay Blue Cross more money than they do now for worse insurance or be fined 2.5% of their income, I have a feeling it’s not just going to be a couple of radical lefties who are pissed off about what amounts to an increase in middle class taxes.
Indeed. I’ll be on the warpath if that’s what the Democrats think passes muster.
