Schuster and others: "How did the Public Option become the Holy Grail of Health Reform"?
Well that's easy - when you took off Single Payer you left only one other rational choice, Public Option (which allows the public to choose single payer by proxy). Don't ask us to compromise anymore - Public Option is the compromise.
The reason that it is the Holy Grail is because it represents a structural change.
That it is a modest change in the structure of providers is irrelevent - we can make a modest change more significant later.
All of the other elements of the health care bill represent changes to the current structure but I would exchange all of them for a public option.
Once in hand the people will have a chance to vote with their feet and the pressure on the insurance companies will be unceasing and unrelenting. It will, in time lead us to single payer.
If the final bill doesn't include a strong public option then let it be defeated and we can go to 2010 with a battle cry and the people will respond. People may like their doctor but no one likes their health insurance company.
If something is so important that everyone must have it, then it should be something that the government should offer and not a private for-profit entity.
Put the public option in a Red shirt and beam it down to the planet surface with the away team consisting of Spock, Kirk, Bones, and Sulu... it's dead Jim.
6. Jonathan Alter was just on MSNBC saying to Schuster..........
that Dems may have to hold their noses and accept a corporate-run HCR as it better than nothing. I think he used the term "going down with the ship" when talking about some pundits notion of rejecting a HCR plan w/out a public option.
It seems that the public option is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
I agree with what you say except for the lack of a PO being a call to action in 2010. I think its make-or-break time for HCR right now.
12. I suspect you are right. If there is any fight left in this White House I have to believe that
a strategy has been developed along the lines of "If they do this, we do that..." in a bunch of different scenarios. So I am going to wait and see how this comes down...
19. I'm thinking the opposite direction, that we're going to be surprised by how fast they fold.
In this case, the analogy might better be the Quasi-War. Lots of posturing, lots of anticipating a brutal fight, but in the end we've got the votes to do this without them.
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