I almost blew my stack when I heard about this ("White House Appears Ready to Drop 'Public Option'"). See here.
Hurray! Now all the Teabaggers will go home and tons of Republicans will get on board with health care reform, right? . . .
So Obama campaigns for 2 years with the public option as the centerpiece of his health care reform. He's elected by the largest majority in 20 years, and the public gives him 60 Democratic seats in the Senate and 256 Democratic seats in the House. Obama then publicly lobbies for said public option after he takes office.
Then Kent Conrad, who represents like 7 people, and a handful of corrupt Blue Dogs say "No way." And Obama caves.
Big victory! . . .
See here too ("Shorter Sebelius: We surrender").
So with a 60/40 Senate, the White House is willing to give corporate interests, three conservative Democrats, two conservative Republicans and a moderate Republican total control over the health care reform bill.
And in an update to that:
Ian Welsh is right: an individual mandate to buy private insurance with no public option is "a regressive tax which will rise faster than wages or inflation."
I was so pissed that I immediately cancelled my $1/day donation "till healthcare passes" to the Democrats. I then contacted the White House and told them.
2 comments:
As a pro-teabagger, let me just say that I totally prefer a single payer plan to an individual mandate.
And individual mandate is the worst of all worlds and I hope that is something we can all agree on.
A LOT of people have NO IDEA that there is an individual mandate in the bill. So if the public option is dropped, many republicans who would not favor an individual mandate if they knew it existed will claim victory and stop protesting.
I sincerely believe that all both Democrats and Republicans want is the individual mandate and that that is truly how their bread (campaign funds) is to become buttered (increased).
No one with a brain that knows what it would be like to have a mandate to buy health insurance no matter what it costs would support the individual mandate.
I know that most democrats would hate a bill that has no public option but an individual mandate. If you want to make sure the individual mandate part doesn't ever see the light of day by itself, you had best get to educating everyone, both democrat and republican about the Individual Mandate. Because it is worse than nothing. FAR WORSE.
To clarify, what I mean by Democrats and Republicans is the politicians themselves, not the voters.
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