On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Anthony Kennerson wrote:
> > Let's be clear: A Healthcare bill without a public option is D.O.A. in
> > the House. Period.
> >
> > To pass any bill in the House they need at least 218 votes but 64
> > House Democrats have stood up and said they will not vote for a bill
> > without a public option. That means a bill without a public option
> > would only have 193 votes."
>
> No....that means simply that Emanuel and Company only have to flip 19
> "progressive" Democrats in order for them to force the crappy
> Obama/Romney/McCainCare plan of the Senate into law.
Indeed! Even Dean clearly doubts this is true. This whole missive is a call to shore up the 64 Democrats against the pressure he expects to come.
But it seemed worth noting as a point of information as to how the debate will spool out. It's not yet over in a temporal sense, even if it's "over" in the fat lady sense.
I hope this doesn't obscure my larger point though, which is that flaying Obama for giving up the public option is wrong because ALL THE PUBLIC OPTIONS ON OFFER SUCK SO BAD THAT NONE WOULD BE JUST AS GOOD.
Or arguably even preferable. Obamacare as a system is going to fail financially, and soon -- conceivably even before 8 years are up. That's a given. The strongest public option on offer will not slow it down the slightest bit. So given that, we might be better off without any public plan. That way people won't be able to say that the government plan didn't do any better.
Yelling about it as if it did matter might be tactically useful. Making it sound like a big concession might prevent some malignness elsewhere when the conciliation committee gets out its knives.
But beyond posturing, the idea that a strong public option would have made a big difference is simply bushwa IMHO.
One can coherently argue that the whole Obamacare adventure has been a disaster and has set single payer back: that when it fails we'll be worse off, and that differently managed, we might have gotten more. But IMHO you can't argue that a strong public option would have made it something good and its absence makes it something bad. It just isn't true and repetition hasn't made it true. The liberals believe it because they're liberals; they need to believe. But there is no reason single-payer radicals should delude themselves.
Again, this long but detailed argument is an excellent explanation of why:
To sum that article up in two sentences: all the public plans that were ever put forth in the Obamacare debate have been missing 5 elements essential to their even theoretically being able to make a difference, the most important of which is pre-population. Without those 5 key elements, the strongest of them is simply a rehash of the MassCare public option -- which from a single payer POV is no better than not having one at all.
If there was a Rubicon, this wasn't it.
Michael