via AlterNet:
Health Care Rats Come Out of the Woodwork
Posted by Matt Taibbi,
True/Slant at 12:00 PM on August 20, 2009.
On both sides of the "debate," pundits' main concern seems to be that readers are demanding the public option, in spite of what they're being told.It is not the be-all and end-all of health-care reform. It is not the long-awaited safety net for the uninsured. And if, as many liberals hope, it turns out to be nothing more than Medicare for All, it won't do anything to hold down long-term growth in health spending.
via Public Optioned-Out -- The Opinionator Blog -- NYTimes.com.
There are some days when it almost seems like the national press is making a conscious effort to prove Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent gospel. If the national commercial media really did exist solely to perpetuate the attitudes of the political elite, and to create phony debates around unthreatening policy poles, endlessly pitting a conservative/reactionary status quo against an "acceptable" position of dissent -- if that thesis were the absolute truth, then you'd see just what we're seeing now in the coverage of the health care debate.
All across the country the news media reacted to the White House leak about the possibility of the public option being dropped with, well, an oddly circumspect tone. Although some initial stories carried a sensational tone, within a day or two the debate had settled down, and the country’s most prominent pundits were considering this treacherous and cowardly development in a pragmatic light. In Eric Etheridge’s review-of-reviewers blog int he Times, the "Opinionator," the situation was described this way:
The debate is primarily on the left, or among the Democrats, where partisans are furiously arguing along two intersecting fronts: First, the public option is or is not an essential element of reform. Second, abandoning the public option will or will not make passing the remainder of reform more likely.
This superficially is true, I guess. There were a few voices arguing that the public option is the bare minimum "reform" that the public should tolerate, and a few who argued that if it is not in the final version, progressives should reject the proposal.
But overwhelmingly the pundits went the route predicted by Manufacturing Consent. The most prominent voices in the last two days have mostly chosen one of two sides to argue. Many attacked the public uproar over the White House’s apparent surrender, blasting the public option as an unrealistic and meaningless affectation, a policy kewpie doll for unrealistic liberals who "don't want to be bothered with the real-life dynamics of the health care market," as the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein put it (in his column with the amusingly obnoxious title, "Enough Already With the Public Option!"). The White House itself is covertly putting itself in this camp via “unnamed” sources who are expressing rank insider astonishment over the rabble’s naivete, for instance here in the Washington Post:
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."
"It’s a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."
.............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/142095/health_care_rats_come_out_of_the_woodwork/
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