In deference to my wife, who retains her fierce loyalty to Obama, I confess that I’ve been somewhat detached the last few days, lacking 24 hour a day access to the internet. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that real health care reform is slipping away, with the Obama administration sending, at best, mixed signals about its intentions with respect to the public option:
The White House has indicated that it could accept a nonprofit health care cooperative as an alternative to a new government insurance plan, originally favored by President Obama. But the co-op idea is so ill defined that no one knows exactly what it would look like or how effectively it would compete with commercial insurers.
What is certain is that, as a substitute for a government plan, the co-op concept disappoints many liberals and stirs little enthusiasm among insurers or Republican lawmakers.
The cooperative are the brain child (if they can be dignified with that adjective) of Kent Conrad, who, along with Max Baucus appears to be determined to derail health care reform.
Bearing in mind that the public option is, itself, a poor substitute for single-payer, it fairly boggles the mind that the White House may be prepared to back it. It is not at all clear what the White House gains by that approach, other than a photo-op. A bad bill will not attract Republican votes, but it will fail, thus validating the Republican claim that the government can’t do health care. The cooperatives are pretty much universally acknowledged to be design-to-fail institutions.
I stand by my position that George Bush was the worst president in American history, but that doesn’t mean he was not a successful president. He never had the majorities Obama has, and yet he got everything he ever wanted, with the single exception of social security destruction. He cowed the Democrats and he enforced unity among the Republicans. He never compromised, and he certainly never felt a few token Democratic votes were worth substantive compromises.
Obama ran for offices telling us “Yes, we can”, but he has too taken a “no, we actually can’t unless the Republicans and a few asshole Democrats let us” approach. I am personally clinging to the hope that Obama has some sort of long term strategy here, but I confess it’s looking like a vain hope. The pointless desire to get a few Republican votes, the fact that, as Paul Krugman said, the Obama people “still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away”, the failure to promote a plan that people can understand and rally behind, all bespeak an administration that has little capacity to either understand what it is up against or capably lead its own troops. The other side has “death panels” to oppose, but what do we have to support? How enthusiastic can you get about a plan that promises to, at best, ameliorate the worst excesses of the system, or, at worst, become a Christmas tree for the drug and insurance industry?
This is what comes from fashioning your opening bid as something that you believe can be sold to an opposition that you should know will inevitably oppose anything you do. Had he started with single payer, he could have compromised down to a public option. How hard could it have been for him to realize that neither the Republicans nor the insurance companies would have gone with his opening offer, no matter how reasonable. How hard to see that advancing a confusing plan, just like Clinton did, gives our enemies a chance to confuse while making it impossible for your friends to explain. How much simpler would our job be if we were defending “Medicare for all”? That’s a program everyone understands, even the idiots attacking the public option while insisting that their Medicare be protected.
I understand that there are hopeful signs out there. Pelosi is standing by the public option, and Jay Rockefeller, of all people, is insisting on it. Maybe this is all part of a subtle Obama plan. If it all works out in the end I’ll be mightily impressed, but it really is beginning to look like this administration’s motto is “No, we can’t”.
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