My latest for the Guardian UK’s “Comment is Free” website sort of overwrites my previous one, as the Obama Administration and its centrist allies seem primed to do the impossible after all – unite the tea party right and progressives against them on health care – unless Congressional Dems can save them from themselves:

Obama has lost his way on healthcare

His strategy has been reduced to crude political horse-trading, and is not grounded in a reasoned discussion of public policy

[…] Consider: a bill with a serious public option brings the progressives on board. A bill without a public option, but with reforms such as community rating and support for primary care brings most progressives on board, albeit grudgingly.

But the ideas being discussed now split the difference in the worst possible way. The centrist option may in fact include the worst of all possible worlds; an “individual mandate” that citizens purchase health insurance without a government administered option that could be fine tuned to meet the needs of low and middle class Americans squeezed out by prohibitively expensive (and wholly inadequate) private coverage.

To the progressives, such a bill supplants concerns of altruism and empathy with Singerian utilitarianism. Simply forcing the uninsured into private plans, already virtually unaffordable for many, and without any meaningful cost containment or regulatory scheme, is as crazy as it sounds, particularly when one considers the twin realities of recession, and the fact that health care spending is projected to be fully double 2007 levels in just over eight years.