Jul 30 2009

Another Public Option

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?

by Jeff Cohen

I’ve started deleting them as spam.  

I’m not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or “You’ve Won the Lottery” notices.  

I’m talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a “public option” for health care — a government insurance plan citizens could choose to pay for instead of private insurance.  

Never has so much passion been so misdirected.  If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that the demand.

Especially of a president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing.

Sure, Obama was a community organizer once.  That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.  

For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician — and a consummate compromiser at that.  Have we failed to notice?

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All.  In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option — to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.  

Read the entire article…

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America .  

46 comments

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    • Edger on July 30, 2009 at 19:24
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  2. a basic misunderstanding of the “public option” , or the desire to let Obama get whatever he wants w/o checking into those pesky details, or the need to do something, anything at all, and then claim victory.

  3. It’s true — many of the liberal groups have been pushing for “public option” and I have ignored them, not signing petitions, etc.  The “public option” is not a healthcare plan period.  See Health Consumer Insurance Protections  Note the last mentioned “advantage.”

    Guaranteed Insurance Renewal

    Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won’t be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

    And, since employers are going to be given the added benefit of not having to provide insurance for their employees — it means that everyone is totally on their own in terms of having insurance at all.  And what if you can’t pay for it??????

  4. Health Insurance Stocks Soar On Baucus Deal

    Over at Campaign Silo, Teddy Partridge looks at the kinds of returns involved in the health care reform arena:

    News that Senator Max Baucus’ Finance Committee deal on health care financing excluded a public option sent health insurance stocks soaring Tuesday.

    Shares of U.S. health insurers rose broadly on Tuesday on hopes a health reform bill would not include a government-run option, which has drawn strong opposition from insurers who fear it would destroy the private marketplace.

    The S&P Managed Health Care index of large U.S. health insurers closed 6.5 percent higher.

    Aetna rose 12.6 percent, Coventry was up 12.7 percent and Cigna was 7.7 percent higher, all on the New York Stock Exchange. Centene rose 7.9 percent.

    This is funny, because I am reliably informed that Max Baucus has concerns that government intervention in private markets could be a disaster for the country!

    And this from Joshua Holland:

    How Corporate Media, Sellouts in Congress and Industry Bigs Have Hijacked the Health Care Debate

    . .  . . They’ve successfully focused the health care debate on the short-term costs to the federal government’s bottom line, obscuring the potential impact that a meaningful realignment of the health care system would have on the economy as a whole. In so doing, opponents of reform have hoodwinked much of the public into believing that investments in America’s national health care system will wind up costing individuals more than they had gained from the effort.

    . . . . So, next time you see some congressional meat-puppet on TV discussing how much a plan will cost, or lamenting its limited potential for cost containment, keep in mind that it’s his or her ideology that is directly to blame for those shortcomings.

    It’s only because of pressure from industry groups, Republicans and Blue Dog Dems that congressional leaders took single-payer off the table (and threw advocates out of the room) and gave us a limited public insurance option — a pale shadow of what reformers had been promised.

    Now, those same forces are bent on killing an already-watered-down proposal. If they succeed, we can expect more human suffering, more outlandish increases in premiums, more people being denied care, an increase in the numbers of uninsured and a continued drag on the American economy.  (worth reading whole article)

    Single-payer is really the only plan that would actually save money and do any good period!

  5. taking place right now in D.C.  David Swanson is there and reporting on it here  It’s worth reading, note this comment from DS, as well:

    I just found a great article on single-payer and the damage done by pushing the “public option” from Jeff Cohen.

    Hah, who got there first, Edger?  LOL!

    • Edger on July 30, 2009 at 21:39
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    I have this on reddit here and the corpotrolls are down rating it to make it invisible.

    Please go there and uprate it by clicking on the UP arrow beside the title. Thanks!

  7. Supposedly progressive sites like DK are actually hurting progressive causes.  There are simply too many centrists on there who overpower the leftist thinking.  I’m also convinced their is a substantial presence of paid or unpaid trolls with a specific agenda of disrupting true progressive discussion.  I’m an government analyst by trade, have been for 28 years.  I’ve learned how to cut thru the bullshit.  The I/P diaries on DK are a perfect example.  There is clearly a group of people using the Zionist ploys of calling anyone an anti-semite when anything touches on criticism of Israel.  It’s obvious and actually blatant.  I sent a message to Meteor Blades about it and told him it was digusting and ruining the site.  

  8. …I refuse to be an obamaniacalmoonie.  Not now.  Not ever.  Thanks Edgerrr!

  9. In the next couple of years, I think the Canadian government needs to prepare for an onslaught of illegal aliens sneaking across the border into Canada. I’m not talking about the usual suspects but U.S. citizens needing health care rather than worthless insurance.  

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