Reply #2: People are unrecommending this?

[salvorhardin]

Jacob Hacker is generally considered the father of the public option. His opinion here is important. Further, he's far from an unabashed supporter of the bill.

Progressives have good reason to be angry. Yet we should harness our anger to fix the bill--now and every year from now. The current bills in Congress do too little to help Americans immediately; their main actions are delayed for years. If and when legislation passes, progressives should demand immediate concrete actions to make the promise of a reform a reality more quickly and more effectively.

So a bill must pass. Yet it must be a better bill that passes. And it must be understood by the President, the Congress and every American as only a step--an important but ultimately incomplete step--toward the vital goal that the campaign for the public option embodied: good affordable health care for every American.

He's saying the bill is better than nothing, does contain a scant few real reforms but we need to demand better. Passing the bill gives us a starting point to get closer to what we want in the future. If you're unrec'ing this because you think this is my opinion, well, I just don't know. I know I wanted Medicare buy-in for all, but it's very clear we're getting the bill Obama wanted all along. So this is what we have. If this goes down now, I fear it'll be another sixteen years at least before we can get another chance to make any kind of reform. If this bill passes, then despite all its inadequacies, it gives us a lever and a place to stand to get more meaningful reforms enacted down the road. Granted, that lever isn't as big as we'd like but it's at least something. For now. Maybe.