If Obama's advisers had any killer instinct, they would push him to zero in on an absolutely golden opportunity to include a public option in the historic HCR bill. There appears to me to be no downside to this move unless Obama and his peeps are worried about how the corporate world would react to doing something that could actually put right what is so very wrong with health care in our country.
The reason this jewel of an opportunity exists is that surprise surprise after the house passes the senate's HCR bill we have a real from the heart kumbaya moment where the love is flowing the tears are rolling and the polls are loving this HCR victory. Can anyone really see any of those 219 Democratic representatives being the one who once again drives HCR into the ditch. No way no how.
Axelrod says Obama is a warrior. Oh how I would love to really believe that is true. For our prez to gain warrior status in my book, he goes in for the killer move that truly leads to real health care reform. Now I know this is asking a lot of him but is it really asking too much? It sure as hell is not. The Dems are feeling that rush of blood when you have your hand on the wheel and pedal to the metal knowing you are taking this baby home. This is real power they are experiencing and a true sense of making history that is good and possibly great. However, instead of taking advantage of their new found confidence and the support they have by the majority of Americans instead of letting that sense of power bloom and take root President Obama and those so called geniuses that advise him are letting fear of blowing another rare chance to fix health care, control them. What should be driving their behavior is the raw sense of power that comes from winning a hard fought battle against great odds and knowing that Right is on your side and is a powerful wind is blowing at your back.
Veronica De La Cruz: Change We Can Believe In, Even From Paris
There is still plenty of work to be done. So before we uncork the champagne, let's roll up our sleeves. No matter what side you were on, think of this as the beginning, not the end.
Miles Mogulescu: The Blind Side: Starring Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama
While I'm cheering for Pelosi's political skill, I wish I could be cheering louder for passage of a bill that actually did more to accomplish universal affordable health care for all Americans.
David Sirota: Senate Bill Going Back to the House - Can We Now Get a Public Option Vote?
I ask what we asked yesterday at our rally at Sen. Bennet's office: Will our senator now fulfill his promise to push a public option using reconciliation? Or are we going to get yet another ridiculous excuse?
Gary Stein: Health Care Reform: A Human Issue -- Not A Political Issue
The moral of this story is that the health care system and the health of this country is not and should not be a political issue. It is a human one. Support of health care reform is a matter of karma.
Research your local hospitals and healthcare insurance companies in your area. What will you find?
1. Hospitals over-bill for services delivered; often accepting as payment only about 20% to 30% of what it bills. Do you accept your hospital to be like a bazaar in the Mid-East? Hospitals need to adopt a "billing code of conduct" with no more cost-shifting and other shenanigans.
2. Do hospitals have a Quality Improvement and Utilization Review committees? What's their monitoring criteria? What have they found? How does their data compare to national averages?
3. From your insurance companies, (or state health commissioner's office) what are COSTS and OUTCOMES among various healthcare providers in your regions for different illnesses? How does the data compare to regional and national averages?
4. What are above groups doing to monitor and correct the widely reported high incidence of over-treatment, under-treatment and inappropriate-treatment?
5. What are hospitals / community doing to end non-emergency visits to the ER?
6. What's the community doing to reduce high cost of end-of-life care?
Wake-up and take-over at grass-roots. Politicians will not do it for us. Its not a Left or Right issue.
Now that the reconciliation bill is going back to the House, Bennet has no excuse not to come through on his promise to save the public option.
The President may not be worse than anyone else in politics, but he's shown he's just the same.
The only thing that the President will do now is deposit those corporate campaign checks he'll receive for delivering a mandate to buy private insurance with no choice of any form of public option -- the exact opposite of his campaign platform.
He's no warrior. He's a just typical politician and a brilliant one at that.
All the noise we hear about a future public option or Medicare buy-in from some members of Congress and commentators are just weak-willed progressives trying to cover their behinds with the base after not keeping their promise not to vote for a mandate without a public option.
They played us all for fools and because we are so desperate to believe they didn't, we'll believe anything they say.
I would love for my cynicism to be proven wrong, but I don't believe it will be.
His support of the public option has always been tepid at best, and now there's other legislation for Obama and his advisers to attend to. The calculation may be that getting banking reform legislation, etc. passed will boost the position of Dems in time for the midterm elections.If Dems are going to seriously take up the PO, Progressives have to make them do it, not an easy task, especially when other legislation is pending which also requires our attention.
Also, the NYT article is dated 8/18/2009, yet the WH pushed a triggered PO for the Senate bill and supported the House PO in November, disproving any notion of a deal to kill PO in August (or earlier).
Maybe there was a deal to not have PO at medicare rates. That makes sense with what the Congress eventually (tried to) pass: The PO passed by the House and persued by Reid weren't at medicare rates.
There was no deal to kill PO in general, and even the "damning" NYT article cited by Mogelescu says so. Go read the NYT artlcle for yourself.
Mogelescu complains that nobody else ran with the story, since you'd think that such a story would be huge. The reason nobody ran with it is because everyone already knows that medicare rateed PO was killed because hospitals didn't like it and that the Congress eventually persued a PO at higher rates.