The vast majority of American citizens want single-payer, universal healthcare coverage. Fully 72% (only 20% were opposed) of the citizenry want a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans” according to a June 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll. A whopping 76% would settle for the public option.
Yet President Obama refuses to govern like he received a mandate. First refusing to consider a single-payer option and now signaling that he’s willing to jettison the public option as well. For what? Two Republican votes that will probably never materialize. Never mind that Obama campaigned hard on the public option being essential to healthcare reform. In fact, the only thing separating Obama’s healthcare plan from Hillary Clinton’s was mandated health insurance. Obama opposed making people purchase insurance they couldn’t afford.
What happened since the election? Has anyone asked Obama if he’d like some chicken with all that waffling?
Not only would the public option keep the private insurance companies honest, the plan would provide good insurance to millions who currently can’t afford it. But now Obama seems to be trying to talk himself—and us—out of the only real way of containing healthcare costs.
If that weren’t bad enough, Wendell Potter believes “not only is Obama clearly ready to throw the public option overboard, he is embracing the requirement that we all be forced to buy insurance from private insurers.” Wendell Potter should know. He spent 20 years as a flak for CIGNA.
Last Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writing for the New York Times, reported that the Obama administration began signaling “it has backed away from its once-firm vision of a government organization to provide for the nation’s 50 million uninsured and is now open to using nonprofit cooperatives instead.” Indeed, earlier that day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNN that the public option “is not the essential element” of Obama’s plan. Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary reaffirmed that position on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Without a public option, income taxes on the middle class and our health insurance premiums will almost certainly rise substantially in order to pay the subsidies to the insurance corporations that will have a spanking new 50 million captive customers, mandated to carry health insurance. Oh happy day! Potter reminds us that one of Obama’s closest healthcare advisors—Aetna chief executive Ron Williams, “who made $65 million off of Aetna’s policyholders’ premiums over the past two years and who was the mastermind behind Aetna’s shedding of eight million members a few years ago to meet Wall Street’s demands”—has the president’s ear and almost certainly has been talking trash against the public option. Potter cites David Whelan’s Forbes article reporting that Williams and Aetna will dump an additional 600,000 or so policyholders in the next few months to satisfy Wall Street’s profit demands.
It’s time that Obama and his “friends”—Rahm Emanuel, I’m looking at you—remember that the public option is the compromise as Jane Hamsher so eloquently pointed out to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell yesterday:
“Mitchell: Kent Conrad and other more conservative Democrats who have been negotiating these compromises in Senate Finance say that there will be no bill if there’s a public option.
“Hamsher: Well, with 76% of the country in favor of it, you’ve got Democrats like Joe Crowley, like Charlie Rangel, like Ed Markey who are going to have trouble going back to their districts that have 22% Democratic advantage and saying ‘I gave the farm away to the insurance companies.’
“Mitchell: So you’ve got the House that’s committed to this, that say they won’t do anything if it doesn’t have a public option, and you’ve got the Senate saying they won’t do it if there is a public option. Is there a compromise there that does involve those co-ops, or is it better to have nothing?
“Hamsher: Well, the compromise is the public plan—that’s the compromise down from single payer. So that is the middle ground. And frankly I would like to see Democrats like Evan Bayh and like Max Baucus stand on the floor of the Senate and filibuster the Democratic program that 76% of the country…
“Mitchell: But Jane that’s not gonna happen. It’s not where they are.
“Hamsher: Uh, why not?
“Mitchell: Because that’s not where they see their constituency. That’s not where Evan Bayh sees more conservative Democrats in his state of Indiana.
“Hamsher: Evan Bayh’s wife is on the Board of Wellpoint. So I think that he’s going to have a problem doing something that tanks the Democratic plan that strongly favors something that he has a financial interest in. There’s a whole lot of insurance money going to these Senators and that’s going to be something that people are going to be looking into if that’s how this winds up.
“Mitchell: Civil war?
“Hamsher: I think that there’s going to be a problem. I think that the White House did not factor in that members of the House would have a very difficult time in their heavily leaning Democratic districts taking a bad vote and there are enough of them that could keep this thing from passing without Obama stepping in and committing to get the public plan that he campaigned on.”
Never mind that Andrea Mitchell‘s husband is former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan (and remember that Dollar Bill Greider’s piece was written in September 2005, when the markets were still rolling merrily off the cliff).
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