With the political winds shifting hard against him, President Obama will face the nation in just a matter of hours. The question is will he sell us down the river and cave into the "Republocrats" (A weird hybrid beast of Republican, Democrat and Plutocrat all thrown into one!) or will he stick to his guns and finally give the American people true universal health insurance?
It all depends on the Public Option. Without it, the reform that passes could actually be worse than doing nothing. With it, we have a real shot at meaningful health reform. The president must make the public option a deal breaker. There should be no bill without it.
Strange that those who are frothing at the mouth over this aspect of the plan forget that the most popular and effective aspects of our current health care "system" are the government run parts: Medicare and the VA system, for instance.
Of course the super rich are pretty happy too...
An interesting question will be if the president and his team think that *any* victory is sufficient or if they actually need to pass something that works.
Let's hope it's the latter.
Here is my prediction: if they do not include a robust public option, the policy will fail to cover everyone and fail to control costs. Then the GOP will be able to turn around and trounce the Dems by arguing that government never works and the health care bill will be proof of their argument.
They'll be right.
Policies designed to fail will pretty much fail every time.
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Good luck with this blog, Michael. It's amazing to hear the attacks on health care reform coming from the "Right" wing, esp. the fear of "government-run programs." I wonder how many of those critics are on Medicare?
ReplyDeleteCarolyn West
Michael,
ReplyDeleteLet’s hope that the President is successful in rallying the American people and Congress behind meaningful health care reform. What makes most sense to me is an extension of Medicare to the entire population. It’s a program that works fairly well, and most Americans are familiar with it and favor it.
What worries me is that the kind of health care reform that both of us (and the president) favor may not have the votes in Congress to pass, no matter what Obama does. You say better no bill than an inadequate one. I disagree. President Clinton threw down the gauntlet in 1993, threatening to veto any bill that didn’t conform to the plan Hillary constructed. As a result no health care bill passed, which proved a political disaster for the Democrats in the 1994 elections, when they lost their majorities in both houses of Congress. After Obama’s promise to forge a bipartisan fix this country’s health care mess, not getting any bill passed would be an even greater disaster for the Democrats than the 1994 debacle. And I don’t think that any progressive thinking American wants Republicans in charge again.
So, in case Obama cannot obtain the bill he wants, he has to have a “Plan B.” Meaning he must be prepared to negotiate deals and compromise with “Blue Dog” Democrats and a few moderate Republicans to get a health care bill passed that provides some form of coverage to those who currently cannot afford it. In a recent Op-Ed column in the NYT, Bill Bradley suggested a bipartisan tradeoff—Republicans would get malpractice tort reform in exchange for voting for universal health care coverage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/opinion/30bradley.html
Let’s get a program in place that covers everyone, even if it is only incrementally better than what we currently have. It can then be modified over time as the public becomes more enlightened.