No Public Option
Hm... The NYT says:
[S]enators said the tentative agreement would sideline but not kill the “public option” championed by President Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress ( Read more... )
[S]enators said the tentative agreement would sideline but not kill the “public option” championed by President Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress ( Read more... )
Comments 5
I think the concern progressives have is that we're going to have a mandate for everyone to buy insurance[1], we need an actual alternative to the existing private insurers, who all seem to operate on the same business plan: gouge the customer with constant price hikes (and fees, and copays, and and and), and then avoid payouts by every means possible, even if that means flirting with (and often outright committing) fraud. The CBO has expressed skepticism that the regulatory package will be adequate to prevent the insurers from continuing to find ways to screw over sick people -- that was why they believed that a public option would end up with a sicker clientele, and thus need to collect higher premiums in spite of lower overhead costs.
In the examples of all-private systems that work (e.g. Switzerland), the private plans are all non-profit. A reform that does not either take ( ... )
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In principle, I would like to believe this, but I actually secretly believe that when you have to corral Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman (not to mention the 58 other people) in order to pass your bills, you have to give them a lot of leeway. By not pushing on reforms that would substantially negatively impact industry (or, at least, their profits), he has kept industry from launching massive public relations campaigns against reform (which would probably have scuttled it).
And it has been successful, in the sense that we are pretty close to passing an actual bill. It seems likely to me that this is the best we could have expected from any president, in practice, given the makeup of Congress. As they say, politics is the art of the possible.
Fundamentally, I think people expect too much of him. That jibes with what I said when he got electedI mostly agree with the rest of ( ... )
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If Reid, Biden, and Obama were willing to really take a stand, they could go to reconciliaton -- and if the current Senate Parliamentarian didn't want to approve the use of reconciliation for the healthcare bill, they can fire him and get a new one. There's precedent for that, too: In 2001, the Republicans fired the Parliamentarian for refusing to consider reconciliation for the big tax cut bill, and got a new one willing to accept the ludicrous notion that the tax cut would not adversely affect the deficit ( ... )
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Right. In some respects, the whole argument has been a red herring.
If Reid, Biden, and Obama were willing to really take a stand, they could go to reconciliaton
That would be extremely difficult to pull off. They would have to go through the bill point by point and argue about its effect on the deficit.
If they fired the parliamentarian, the Republicans would ride that all the way through 2010.
If it came down to a majority vote, it might be possible that some of the support would evaporate anyway. The squeaker of a victory in the house was largely due to the assumption on the part of several representatives that the Senate would water down the bill. Special interests would start leaning hard on many of the Senators in a way that they don't have to right now.
I also have to say, I'm a bit worried about anything that lets the private insurers go interstate, because that ( ... )
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