I posted a piece to the Guardian site on the liberal reaction to the Baucus health care bill passing out of the Senate Finance Committee with the help of Olympia Snowe. Public option promoters among the liberal online activist set (folks like Chris Bowers and Jane Hamsher) fully expected this result, so in a sense nothing has changed. The cooperation of Snowe, however, gives ammunition to those in the traditional media and the Obama Administration who wouild like to jettison the public option in favor of something seen as “centrist,” rehardless of its ultimate viability and effectiveness. From the piece:
The dangerous dynamic for the Obama administration is clear. If, as all signs indicate, they truly would prefer to abandon the public option in a final bill, the left will try to cast them as standing with the nasty insurance industry over regular folks. The White House will move quickly to try and get ahead of that rhetoric, while simultaneously touting Snowe’s support for the finance committee bill.
The next round of the battle will be an attempt by Reid, in concert with Baucus, the Obama administration and senator Tom Harkin (whose committee produced a bill to the liking of progressives), to merge the products on the table into a final bill to be presented to the full Senate.
Given the blowback from AHIP’s aggressiveness and the current unanimity of progressives, the left may – for the moment, at least – be able to counter somewhat the narrative of bipartisanship created by Snowe’s vote and influence this next, crucial stage. The one thing that now seems certain is that a healthcare bill will pass both chambers of Congress, and while many pundits will count the left out of the process after Snowe’s engagement, modern progressives have proven to be a far more resilient lot than their immediate historical predecessors.
Here’s a link to the complete piece.
PS… Also, for those who may have read the post about my son Tucker’s parentally-assigned film project and his associated blog, he watched his first film today; Troy, the big Hollywood treatment of the Trojan War story. His review is up here (keep in mind, he’s 10).
Does the repeated, public explanation and advocacy of the public option by President Obama himself — without which the public option would certainly have been completely off the table long ago — not count at all?
Good god, no wonder it is absolutely impossible to get anything done down there in DC. What a spooky labyrinth that is so effective at blocking anything by simply getting it lost in route. And Baucus is not the one for health care. It is like a rubic’s cube.
and no matter how much support Obama did or didn’t express for the public option (remember … he’s consistently said it isn’t mandatory), a failure to have a true public option is a failure on the part of Obama and the DC Dems.
It also is a failure on the part of the Republican lawmakers, but my expectation for them is failure anyway.
What am I looking for? A government run system that relies on honest and openly disclosed formulas that deal with the costs of running that specific program without regard to the effect such pricing will have on the insurance industry. Essentially I’m looking for Medicare Part E(veryone).