If we can't have a public option, how can co-ops get the job done? Here's how: Require everyone to get health insurance, and for those who can't afford private plans give them coupons that can only be used at co-ops.
I explain further in this video:
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The Public Option? It's About Accountability
It's fashionable in media circles right now to treat the "public option" as nothing more than the political football du jour, to discuss it only...
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Public Option Fundraiser Nets $100k In 24 Hours
A fundraiser launched by progressive bloggers as part of an increasingly aggressive response to White House backsliding on health care reform has out-raised any such...
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Health Care Co-Ops Baffle The Media (VIDEO)
Yesterday, I took a look at One Day In The Incoherent Life Of Health Care Co-Ops, as the media endeavored to explain what a health...
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House Dems Rally Behind Public Option In Weekly Caucus Gathering
House Democrats dialed in Tuesday for their weekly caucus meeting and uniformly expressed support for a public health insurance option as part of comprehensive reform....
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Health Care Co-Op Supporters Don't Know What They're Talking About
So! Have you heard about these HEALTH CARE CO-OPS? If you watched any news at all yesterday, the answer is yes! And as you heard...
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Labor Warns Dems: We'll Sit Out Election If You Oppose Public Plan
One of the country's most prominent union officials is warning that big labor may pull its support from Democrats who don't fight for a government-run...
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Sestak: I'd Have A Hard Time Voting For A Health Care Bill Without A Public Option
He left himself some wiggle room, but, in what appeared to be a challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) said he'd...
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Key Blue Dog Democrat Pushes Health Insurance Co-ops (VIDEO)
One of the chief Blue Dog Democrats in the House made the case on Monday that fellow members of his party should get behind health...
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Senior Democrats Call Public Health Care Option Essential
Several leading Democrats voiced concern Monday about an apparent White House shift on health-care reform, objecting to signals from senior administration officials that they would...
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Insurers' Stocks Rise As Public Option Prospects Fade
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Odds are growing longer for the public health-insurance option that the White House has pushed as part of an overhaul of the...
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Sebelius: Public Health Care Option "Not The Essential Element"
By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer Scroll Down For Video WASHINGTON - Bowing to Republican pressure, President Barack Obama's administration signaled on Sunday it is...
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Schumer: With Franken Seated No Need To Compromise On Public Option
One of the leading Senate Democrats in the health care reform battle said that the seating of Al Franken has given the party the purpose...
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Schumer: Dems May Have To Go It Alone On Health Care
WASHINGTON — Democrats are becoming bolder about their idea that middle-class familes get the option of joining a government insurance plan in any overhaul of...
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Lance Simmens: Do the People Really Understand Health Care Reform?
The opposition forces are strong, but the forces for change are stronger. We must arm these forces for change with arguments and rationales that are understandable and persuasive.
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Cenk Uygur: How the Democrats Should Have Handled the Health Care Debate
A question for the Democrats: How long can you keep getting outplayed by the Republicans, not deliver on your promises and continue to ask for our votes?
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George Lakoff: The PolicySpeak Disaster for Health Care
In the Obama campaign, honest, effective framing was used with great success. But in the Obama administration, something has changed. It needs to change back.
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Dr. Andrew Weil: What's Wrong With American Medicine?
The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.
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Charles D. Ellison: Aggravating the Base into Action
Obama creates the appearance of a White House in crisis, allowing legislative turmoil and spastic town halls. Why not galvanize the left by threatening to pull the plug on any serious reform?
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Bob Cesca: Bipartisanship Porn
What we've been witnessing during this health care reform process can easily be defined as "bipartisanship porn." It's a display of bipartisanship so obscene and excessive that it borders on perverse.
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Mike Lux: I'm for the Obama Health Plan, Are Anonymous White House Staffers?
Why are certain anonymous White House officials trying to undermine the president on health care? This is exactly what happened in the Clinton fight for health care reform.
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Dan Brown: President Obama is Soliciting Health Care Questions... Here You Go!
I and millions of others on the Obama listserv just got an email from David Plouffe announcing that the president will take questions from people online. What's your question for 44?
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Sandy Maisel: Reclaiming Control of the Health Care Debate
The Obama administration needs to recall why he appealed to so many people early in the presidential campaign.
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Bill Scher: Hey Moderates, Public Health Plan Option Will Cut Costs (And Other Fun Facts)
Everybody in the nation wants a public plan option. Both the NBC/WSJ poll and the NYT/CBS poll found overwhelming support, about 75%, for a public plan option.
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Deepak Bhargava: Deflating the Fight for Real Health Care Reform
Regardless of the political reality: co-ops are a bad idea.
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Stephen Herrington: Obama Finally Said It
Private business is no better at running anything than the government. Yes, the private medical insurers should be afraid -- government can kick their ass.
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David Sirota: The Obama Double Standard
This is what you get from a White House that is run by Rahm Emanuel and former Baucus staffer (and famous corporate bum-licker) Jim Messina: A White House that plays hardball, but only with progressives.
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson: President Obama Will Likely Dump the Public Option, and Here's Why
Obama wants -- no desperately needs -- to win a big victory on health care, or at least the appearance of a victory, even if it means scrapping the only thing that really represents true health care reform.
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Mike Lux: The Heart of the Matter
Progressives want, as President Obama does, something to keep the insurance industry honest. If not a public option, what will accomplish that?
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Robert Reich: How Tough is Our President?
The widening gap between admiration for Obama and cynicism about his policies reinforces passivity in his base, which makes it even harder to advance a specific agenda like health care.
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Robert Davey: Bye Bye Public Option
Republicans are still telling lies, only now the lies and misrepresentation are about health reform. And their lies are being believed once again.
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Michele Swenson: 'Public Option' a Shadow of Its Original Intent - Dr. Marcia Angell Advises Optional Medicare Buy-In
By marginalizing the single-payer model from the outset, Democrats have already backed away from making the best case for health care reform as means to economic recovery.
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John Kenagy: Co-ops, the Unconventional and Healthcare Innovation
What's the co-op advantage? There aren't very many of them so we'll have to make them! That's the only way to produce the transformational results that will get patients exactly what they need at lower cost.
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Michael Hais and Morley Winograd: Have Patience: Republicans Are Working Their Way Through the Five Stages of Grieving
Suffering from a series of unexpected and unexplainable defeats, Republicans are likely to go off on a prolonged period of silence and eventually die for lack of political support.
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Cenk Uygur: House Democrats Draw Line in the Sand on Public Option
This is not time for half-measures that won't get the job done. If Obama is going to deliver on his promise of change, this is the the time and healthcare reform with a public option is the issue.
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Frances Moore Lappe: Lying with Alinsky: Don't Let the Far Right Malign "Community Organizing"
Republican anti-reform organizers miss Saul Alinsky's core principles: The point of community organizing is to build the power of regular citizens to gain a seat at the negotiating table.
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Marlene H. Phillips: Obama Confronts Misinformation About Health Care Reform, Back In Campaign Mode
A Twitter-submitted question from Phoenix, AZ spoke of "too many lies, like death panels" and asked the President "where is it all coming from?" adding: "America deserves to know the truth."
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Kimberly Krautter: Did the Inglorious N.O.P. Bust a Cap in Health Care Reform?
From a branding perspective, is this really how the Republican Party wants to be defined? Hate speech -- true hate speech -- should never be tolerated in any form.
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Robert Creamer: "Death Panel" Scare Tactic May Backfire on Republicans
"Death panels" are made up out of whole cloth by people who specialize in generating fear to protect wealthy special interests -- in this case the health insurance industry.
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Neil McCarthy: The Dog Days of August
In this potential summer of his discontent, Obama is running into the same buzz saw that killed health care reform in the last Democratic Administration.
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Miles J. Zaremski: Bureaucrats Already Make Treatment Decisions so Why Fault a Public Option?
President Obama, listen up: have your staff review these Supreme Court decisions and start taking the "bull by the horns" in pressing for a public option that will let doctors make the decisions on how to treat their patients.
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Frank Schaeffer: How the Right and the Left Destroyed the Public Option
The United States of America is one of the only places on earth where all sense of a public space, let alone public duty, is off the table as a matter of faith. Privacy, ownership and profit are what we are about.
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Saul Segan: The Perils of Being Governed
The call for spirituality and the need to put aside selfishness and genuinely try to achieve the desired ends for the greatest of all concerned will result in a greater glory for America.
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Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau: I Am a Business Owner, and I Fully Support a Public Health Option
I am not an expert on health care reform. But I am an individual who is sick and tired of having one industry have so much control over my personal and business life.
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RJ Eskow: Co-op, Co-opt, Cop-Out: Conjugating Health Reform
If the centrist Democrats don't provide a meaningful alternative to costly, for-profit insurance, the backlash against them will be enormous. Co-ops will not be able to provide that alternative.
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Norb Vonnegut: More Talking Points for Clients and Investment Advisers
I invest my clients' portfolios by focusing on their cash needs first: renovations to a house, capital calls from other investments, and tuition for example. These discussions are tangible.
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Adam Hanft: Anniversary Irony: How the Woodstock Generation is Sabotaging Health Care Reform
The generation that sought to spread peace and love throughout society seems completely disinterested in spreading mammographies and diabetes screenings.
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The Media Consortium: Weekly Pulse: Public Option on Life Support
The White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks that the public option belongs in the "nice but not necessary" category. Without it, there's little hope of containing costs or reigning in the power of insurance companies.
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Diane Francis: LBJ Created Canada's Superior Health Care System
Now that the Americans appear to have blown another chance to fix their health care system, it's time for Canadian physicians and others to ratchet up the industry offering selective services to Americans.
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Rick Horowitz: The Health Club at the Corner of Chimera and Mirage
Obama the Developer wants to build a health club. Something classy, that's what he's thinking, with all the latest equipment, and enough room so everyone in town can join.
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Mitchell Bard: When It Comes to Health Care, Why Do Republicans (and Some Centrist Democrats) Hate Americans?
If the government-run plan is so good it would be an improvement over the private insurers, why are the Republicans against it? Isn't the goal better care at lower costs?
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Andy Borowitz: In Move to Appease Critics, Obama Promises to Extend Health Care Coverage to Morons
Facing opposition to his health care reform proposals, President Barack Obama has decided to reach out to a key demographic: morons.
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David Roberts: Netroots Nation Frustration and the Impediments to Progressive Change
It's become clear that structural features of American politics make it so change averse that virtually no progressive electoral sweep is enough to do the job.
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Robert Creamer: Three Reasons Why a Strong Public Option is Likely to be Part of Health Insurance Reform
A public option has none of the bureaucratic complexity of rate regulation and uses competitive forces to keep rates down. It is simple and elegant.
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Paul Abrams: Some Ammo for Health Care Reform: A Little Help for Your Friends
Here's help for those struggling with friends and family who may be shaken by what has occurred during our own August recess in the health care debate.
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Marshall Auerback: Is Obama the Change President -- or the Republicans' Best Manchurian Candidate?
By taking the Rubinite path, Obama leaves government exposed as the lightening rod for everyone's problems. If he had taken a more populist tack, public anger could have been directed at the right people from the start.
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John Geyman: Fiscal Conservatism and Health Care Reform: a Bipartisan No-Brainer?
Why this incredible disconnect among our elected representatives shaping the future of one-sixth of our economy and future health care of all 310 million of us?
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Greg Saunders: How (and Why) Obama Should Kill the Public Option
The danger isn't health care reform minus a public option, it's health care reform that has had other aspects watered down in order to bargain for a public option.
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John David Lewis: Imagine a 'Right' to Car Insurance
The primary cause of medical price increases is the government coercions. But the cause of the coercions is the idea that health care is a right.
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Lincoln Mitchell: Fearing Government Involvement in Health Care
Before we collectively start quaking in fear of a government takeover of health care it might make sense to slow down and consider that a fair amount of our health care system already has strong government involvement.
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Drew Westen: Hoping for Audacity
On issue after issue, the President is selling hope without audacity, leaving centrist Democrats from purple states fearful of attacks from the right on everything from deficits to "socialized medicine." Why?
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Cecile Richards: Women's Health Is Universal Health Care
Does anyone else see the irony in the U.S. bishops wanting to define universal health care as covering everything except for what they don't support?
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Mike Lux: The News of Its Death Is Greatly Exaggerated
Kathleen Sebelius said the public insurance option is not essential, adding to a steadily growing conventional wisdom that the public option is now dead. Not so fast.
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Jane Smiley: What Now?
If we step up to the plate and support Obama now with both our money and our feet, what will we get in return? If the last six months are any indication, the answer is, "Nothing."
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Bill Mann: Millions of 'Dangerous' Socialists Massed on Northern U.S. Border!
Government-run health care is only one thing we Americans can learn from Canada and its "left-leaning" political leaders.
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Bill Scher: How Bad Do You Want The Public Option?
We don't serve our objectives by playing armchair pundit. The right-wing knows this. They don't just listen to Rush Limbaugh: they take that misinformation, and thrust it upon the political system.
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Robert Kuttner: Killing Yourself with Kindness
Republicans made it clear that no goodwill gesture, no effort to meet them halfway signals anything other than weakness. Will somebody explain to me why Obama is still on his bipartisan kick?
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John Geyman: Exchanges, Co-Ops and Cop-Outs on Health Care Reform
If enacted, exchanges and co-ops offering a small public option will only raise hopes for reform that will never come, and are therefore a cop-out for those shaping this year's reform attempt.
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Peter Daou: The Health Reform Fiasco Is an 'Old' Media Triumph -- and a Red Flag for Democrats
The health reform showdown is powerful evidence that the much-touted online advantage of the Left is certainly questionable when it comes to major political confrontations.
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Terry Curtis Fox: Our Existing Public Option
Private insurance companies don't want to be good capitalists and innovate. They fear competition because they are in a position where they don't need to provide a better service.
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Stephen M. Davidson: Why the Public Option is Critical
The U.S. already has the most competitive health insurance system in the world but competition is a good thing only when it produces innovation that leads to better, less expensive things for sale.
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Dr. Susan Corso: Lobbying & Universal Health Care
A one-year moratorium on lobbying would help change the debate from universal health insurance to actual universal health care.
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Senate Guru: Joe Sestak Leads on Health Care Reform
Congressman Sestak's leadership has seemingly been the only thing pulling recent Republican Arlen Specter to the left on key issues in health care reform.
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Jane Hamsher: Sorry, Not Enough House Votes To Pass Health Care Bill Without a Public Option
What was once the defining feature of the Obama health care plan has now been dismissed with a bipartisan flourish.
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