RIP: Public Option

In a yet another policy flip of epic proportion, nearly every democrat on the talking head circuit put to rest the idea that we might get even a small public option for health insurance. Fear tactics and greed in America are once again winning the health care debate. Evidently sixty isn’t enough when the majority of democrats in the senate prefer to join the Republicans in shooting down whatever hope we had of joining the rest of the industrialized and developed world in removing the burden of health care insurance from business and the poor and middle classes.

Carrie Budoff Brown at Politico reminds us what President Barack Obama said about a public option at the beginning of this public policy debacle.

It was only in June that Obama said in a letter to Senate Democrats that “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.”

A month ago, Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address that “any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans – including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest – and choose what’s best for your family.”

The reality on the ground today was delivered by via CNN.

A day after President Obama appeared to suggest that his administration might be open to health care reform legislation that does not include a public health insurance option, one of Obama’s top aides on the issue left the door open to accepting nonprofit health insurance co-ops, a proposal that has gained traction in bipartisan negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee.

“I think there will be a competition to private insurers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, “that really is the essential part, that you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace [after health care legislation is enacted] to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”

At a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado Saturday, Mr. Obama seemed to downplay the necessity of having a public insurance option in the final version of any health care reform legislation presented to him by Congress.

“The public option – whether we have it or we don’t have it – is not the entirety of health care reform,” the President said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And, by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else . . .”

Echoing Mr. Obama’s Saturday comments, Sebelius also told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that “what’s important is choice and competition.” A public option “is not an essential element,” the Cabinet secretary said Sunday.

No wonder they’re planning for windfall profits at United Health Care. They are getting exactly what they want. A bunch of new people at terms that were negotiated by the world’s biggest sucker. How can any one left standing in the Democrat corner possibly believe any thing this administration says from now on? How can we possibly support health care reform that is not about health care or reform. What we are seeing is another big industry payoff placed on the national credit card. I would have never thought I’d have seen the bonus class have so much to celebrate with a democratic majority controlling so much. The only thing that makes the Dubya handouts bigger is that they came with a war that not only cost treasury, but human lives.

I am waiting to see how any one in Left Blogistan can all this anything but complete capitulation. Complete capitulation is not 11th dimensional kung fu chess no matter what hallucinogenic you’ve taken.

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