A private health care insurance regulatory reform act would have been much better than this

[Tom Rinaldo]

That is what makes this current compromise surrender to special interests so doubly tragic. Like any exercise in legislative sausage making, near infinite deals and trade offs went into crafting the piece of Health Care Reform legislation that lies in front of us today. From day one Liberals went along with many of them only as a way to preserve a viable public option within the overall Health Care Reform package, since you have to give up something to get something blah blah. For one thing, sundry formulas that directly impact private industry's bottom line were negotiated and agreed upon early in the process on terms Liberals might not have ordinarily agreed upon, with the understanding that there would be a real public alternative preserved as a result of those concessions, one that would offer real competition to private industry, forcing it to think long and hard about continuing to price gouge their policy holders.

What resulted was a classic shell game. All of the liberal concessions went right to the bank and got cashed, while liberals held onto their legislative I.O.U. Now the shuffling has stopped and the shells have been lifted and there is no Public Option under any of them, let alone a robust one. There is no medicare buy in either. Instead we find restrictive language on abortions.

The choice isn't now, nor has it ever been, between accepting this piece of compromised Health Care Reform legislation or just walking away from Reform efforts. The Republicans always felt smug using fear tactics to oppose a so called socialist government take over of health care. Obama dangling the public option was a useful ploy for them, it helped them organize their base. A simple private health insurance regulatory reform act would have been much harder for them to oppose; it wouldn't have looked nearly as good to threaten a filibuster to preserve the pre-existing condition clauses in current insurance company policies, ending that is socialism people can believe in and Republicans know it. Their leverage would have been greatly reduced and the compromises Democrats would have been forced to accept, given Obama's early insistence on wanting bi-partisan legislation, would have been minimized.

However Obama dangling the promise of a public option was an unmitigated disaster for liberals, and ultimately I believe for the entire Democratic Party. He used the promise of that Will 'o the Wisp to continually wring more concessions out of progressives who wanted to preserve real Health Care Reform, and those concessions came not just on the Public Option itself, but across the board. Progressives in the house would never have swallowed anti-abortion language in the bill they helped pass without it being gift wrapped with a public option sugar coating. And that is just the most recent and most obvious public compromise on principles that progressives got lured into making.

The current Senate Bill is the bad faith product of negotiations made in good faith on false premises. It is not the best that Democrats can deliver on Health Care Reform. It isn't even the best that Democrats can deliver on private health care insurance regulatory reform, even leaving out a public option. It is the fraudulent product of a compromised process. After Democrats swept to power in 2008 with commanding majorities in both Houses of Congress and a new Democratic President who campaigned for a robust Public Option and no mandates on individual purchases, the current effort gets a failing grade. Bush used reconciliation to push through massive tax cuts for the rich with 50 Republican Senators and his Vice President. We bargained away the store after paying for the stolen goods. We've been had.

[Laelth]

1. Agreed, and well said! k&r

Kill the bill.

Forcing people to buy insurance is no more the answer to a failed health care system than forcing people to buy houses is the solution to homelessness.

:dem:

-Laelth

[stray cat]

2. I agree but it would not include coverage for low incomes or for kids

[Tom Rinaldo]

3. We disagree on that then. n/t

[Armstead]

4. Once again you explain what many of us believe perfectly

:toast: for your eloquence and common sense approach.

[Tom Rinaldo]

5. Thank you Armstead

I greatly appreciate your work here as well.

[Armstead]

6. I get more hotheaded about it and piss peopel off

Even though I'm a pussycat in real life

[paulk]

7. very well said

The last paragraph captures why so many of us are disappointed with this legislation and the Democratic Party as a whole.

I know that I, personally, have compromised a lot of my most fundamental principles to get the "commanding majorities" you speak of - and after this debacle, it's going to be damn hard to gather up that enthusiasm again.

[Armstead]

8. They are demanding that we do it still -- but with nothing to offer in return

Now it's -- "Give up your principles because we need a bill by Christmas."

No trade offs offered. Nothing. (Unless you are Ben Nelson.)

[Tom Rinaldo]

9. Thank you.

I am not happy about the need to wrote something like this.

[phleshdef]

10. But isn't that basically whats its turned into anyway?

[Tom Rinaldo]

11. My point is it got severely watered down BECAUSE of the path it took

Now it is weak reform that concedes that Health Care is a problem that can be corrected within the current reliance on private insurance providers. If this was all that was going to be attempted we could have gotten a much stronger bill WITHOUT being forced to openly capitulate on a previously central Democratic ideal.

[Tom Rinaldo]

12. P.S.

You are also failing to note the clusterf_ck on abortion rights that the path chosen led is to. Now some version of that is contained in both the House and Senate versions, it can't be simply dropped.

[phleshdef]

13. The abortion amendment seems to just pay lip service to existing standards, IMO.

I don't see how they really change anything. The government isn't going to subsidize abortions, it didn't before and it won't now.

[Tom Rinaldo]

14. That's not what Planned Parenthood N.O.W. or NARAL say n/t

[phleshdef]

27. As much as I respect those organizations, ANY abortion funding restrictions predictably would piss..

...them off. Thats not unexpected.

[TheKentuckian]

24. No, that's what they are now pretending but the regulations

are near toothless.

The only thing is that the well heeled will no longer be denied the chance to pay kingly sums for coverage. The rest of it seems to be a sham to see how many pounds of flesh big insurance could con America out of to cover some more people at full cost.

[Armstead]

15. Kick for a rational debate

[Cleita]

16. No kidding! n/t

[dflprincess]

17. Remember when Obama (and others) told us how we needed a public option "to keep them honest"?

I didn't understand then why they thought it was necessary to protect an industry they admitted were crooked.

Now they've dropped an pretense of that. "Our" reps are every bit as crooked as the insurers they work for.

[Armstead]

18. Some of them are as croked -- The good ones got rolled over by the schmucks

Unfortunately the schmucks got more support from the White House and Rahmbama.

[dflprincess]

19. There is no excuse for the lack of spine and moral courage

in the senators who know this bill is wrong but are willing to put party above principle. They're even worse than the jerks who honestly (using the word loosely) support it.

[Armstead]

20. I'm sympathetic to them -- but disappointed

Bernie Sanders has always been my hero, and if anyone would fight to the "last man standing" itn would be him.

But he ultimately had to admit defeat and accept whatever he could, including some provision for Community Health Clinics they used to seal the deal with him.

It stinks, but not sure there's more they could have done.

[dflprincess]

21. I do not have any sympathy for them

especially Franken.

He claims to have been a great friend and admirer of Wellstone. He should have followed the example Wellstone set when he was the only senator up for reelection who had the courage to vote against the IWR.

[Armstead]

23. He's always been a centrist

Compared to Republicans, he was a fire breathing liberal.

But he's more of a "Democrat Good Republican Bad" centrist kind of Democrat rather then a Wellstone "do what's right even if you have to fight your own party" Democrat.

[freddie mertz]

22. Yes I do. Too bad the president wasn't really being "honest" on that point.

It's been a great disappointment, with potentially tragic consequences for the nation.

[Tom Rinaldo]

26. I found that choice of words interesting at the time

The inference it made is pretty strong and hard to hide from. Conventional wisdom is that you don't need Cops to keep the Honest honest, just the Crooks. So the crooks get to continue running our health care system, except now the Cops will make sure that we all give them our business.

[Tom Rinaldo]

25. I have noticed a number of Unrecs to this but not one person has given an argument

that rebuts my basic thesis. I spent some time thinking about this folks, I'm certainly not always right but at least I put some effort into it.

If you don't agree with what I wrote then where do you think the logic fails? Or do you just not like seeing this said in print so to speak?

[Tom Rinaldo]

28. Not one person has made a case for why we could not have a better bill than this

based on the points I made here. Why is that? Maybe there is no good case to be made against my conclusions here.

[ProSense]

29. "However Obama dangling the promise of a public option was an unmitigated disaster for liberals"

Oh brother. I guess the entire summer of people playing "when was the last time Obama mentioned the public option" didn't happen?

This debate has been characterized by one moving goal post after another.

Obama offered a framework and restated it to Congress, and it was/is up to them to work out the legislative details.

Not only have people accused Obama of not supporting a public option, which runs counter to what you are now claiming, they demanded it and made health care about it and nothing else, even to the point of lambasting Obama for saying it was a "sliver."

The problem is that people seemed to believe that the debate wasn't to agree on the broader guidelines and strengthen them along the way to passing something, but to grandstand and kill it if it wasn't perfect. It was always going to be based on the initial proposal.
Anything else was up to Congress to introduce, debate and pass.

[Tom Rinaldo]

30. The public option was in the platforms of both Obama and Clinton

Most Democrats expected it not only to be part of HCR, but to be an important part of HCR. Obama did not start out by minimizing the Public Option as "just a sliver" when he first began his push for HCR as Presidnet, to the contrary. It devolved into "just a sliver" after "tea bag summer" made its mark. Until that point there was agreement of the broad guidelines which included a public alternative and that agreement informed the compromises that had been made up until that point.

[ProSense]

31. "Obama did not start out by minimizing the Public Option as 'just a sliver'"

You were expecting him to? Really? Have you discussed that with the "he should have started with single payer" chess players?

[Tom Rinaldo]

32. Actually I expected him to deliver on his campaign promises in this area

I think he made a tactical mistake by so completely sweeping Single Payer off the table so quickly, but I honestly believed that he was trying to use a fresh new approach, saying what he meant and meaning what he said. I actually kind of took him at his word and did not anticipate his backpeddling.

[ProSense]

33. Working to bring 60 Senators and at least 218 Representative to

consensus is not backpedaling. It's negotiating and compromising. That's 60 Senators, when one, luckily, was a switch from the GOP, and another five to eight were determined to throw up obstacles to the process.

[Armstead]

34. They compromised withe right and Big Insurance and Pharma. They told the rest to take crumbs.

[ProSense]

35. Nonsense.

The Republicans were and are irrelevant.

[Armstead]

37. Olympia Snowe and Chuck Grassly weren;t...Remember?

Heck did we even get the "trigger option" that they tried to use to get her on board?


Ooops, I forgot. No public option. Too socialistic. No next step down, a limited Medicare buy in for 55-65 either. Gone too.

But there was compromise. Ben Nelson set the terms. Not a Republican but might as well be.



.

[ProSense]

38. No,

most people knew the the hyperventilating in the media about Snowe was just that.

[Tom Rinaldo]

36. A long time ago I made a post here about this whole process

I said I would withoold judgment on how it was being played out because I was not an insider and was not privy to how the end game would be played and what cards where being held in he hole to be played in the final round of betting. I said I would make my judgment based on results, and that I believed, as does Obama, that the buck stops with the President. I suspected all along that the bipartisan oriented approach that Obama was attempting to pursue prevented him from, among other things, effectively using the bully pulpit to castigate those who argued that the Federal government could not be trusted to run insurance programs. Obama preferred consensus to confrontation and now this has ended up where it has.

We are clearly in the subjective realm here now so it is difficult for either one of us to conclusively prove our view point. Feingold says Obama never pulled out the stops to fight for a strong public option and that seems about right to me. I know that he did not approach winning on this issue the way that Bush approached winning his tax giveaway to the rich with far fewer Republicans holding office then as compared to Democratic majorities today. By taking an approach that was neither fish nor fowl I think we ended up in a weaker place on HCR than our majorities in Congress could have brought us to.

[Armstead]

39. kick

[BlueIris]

40. Kick.

And how.