In this morning’s Washington Post Ceci Connolly is out with a piece highlighting the tension between advocates of the public option and centrist Democratic Senators who have decided to serve as a road block for health care reform:
The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill.
Take a close look at that last line: "centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill."
Centrist Democrats who supported Obama in his bid for president shouldn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting legislation that Obama promised the voters he would implement.
It’s time for progressive Democrats to draw the line in the sand and speak with one voice. They can do that by taking the Public Option Pledge:
I will vote against any bill which does not include a public option that is available everywhere day one and is accountable to voters and to Congress.
Representatives Ellison, Grijalva and Woolsey have already taken the pledge. We need 37 more. The Public Option Pledge is clear, it’s simple and it is based on all of the principles outlined by HCAN:
1. National and available everywhere: A strong public health insurance option will be a national public health insurance program, available in all areas of the country. The insurance industry is made of of conglomerates that have national reach. In order to have the clout to compete with the insurance industry and keep them honest, the public health insurance option must be national as well.
2. Government appointed and accountable: The entire problem with private health insurance is that they aren’t accountable to you or me. A public health insurance option must have a different incentive. A public health insurance option doesn’t have to be a government entity necessarily, but its decision makers must be appointed by government and must be accountable to government.
3. Bargaining clout: The whole point of health reform is to lower health care costs. Clearly, the insurance industry has failed to lower costs when left to their own devices. As the President says, we need a strong public health insurance option to lower rates, change the incentives in our health care system, and keep the industry honest.
4. Ready on day one: The private health insurance industry has utterly failed to control health care costs or provide their customers the quality they’ve paid through the nose for. With one person going bankrupt every 30 seconds due to health care costs, we cannot afford to wait any longer for a real fix. We need the public health insurance option to start lowering prices now. That means no trigger.
We need 40 Democrats total to hold the line against a bad health care bill. Ask them to take the pledge.
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Ceci Connolly is a dishonest reporter. Not that that makes her exceptional, it just needed saying.
Centrist Democrats, you see, risk alienating progressive Tri-Caucus House members who are pledging to vote against any bill that doesn’t include a robust public option. But you will not see this fight framed that way by Ms Connolly.
When Elmore called Ron Wydan office the first time he was told that the senate didn’t have the votes by a staffer…… the second time the staffer really tried to hang up on him….
How many others are getting this reaction?
I’m disappointed that the pledge is based on the HCAN principles rather than the more robust principles set forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC principles are superior in at least one crucial respect:
HCAN: A public health insurance option doesn’t have to be a government entity necessarily.
CPC: A robust public option must…Consist of one entity, operated by the federal government, which sets policies and bears the risk for paying medical claims to keep administrative costs low and provide a higher standard of care…. Utilize the existing infrastructure of successful public programs like Medicare in order to maintain transparency and consumer protections for administering processes including payment systems, claims and appeals.
This distinction is critical to ensuring that the public option does not add an entirely new bureaucracy, which if nongovernmental would actually constitute a new, albeit nonprofit, insurance company, rather than a far more efficient (and potentially more single-payer-ready) adaptation of existing government infrastructures. Note that either way, the public option will already require the creation of a new, wasteful infrastructure in the form of the “exchange.”
I want to see the entire 80-member CPC pledge to vote against any public option that fails to live up to the CPC principles. Since Reps Grijalva, Ellison, and Woolsey are in the leadership of CPC’s health reform efforts, I want to make sure they sign on not just to the HCAN principles, which set a low bar, but to the CPC principles that they themselves helped promulgate.
I don’t see the Exchange as being wasteful or particularly expensive to set up and run.
Furthermore, the public option is entirely separate from the Exchange. Either could exist in the absence of the other.
Yes, a public option could be farmed-out to a private firm to run or it could be run by a government entity (as the Rockefeller bill would establish).
There are options within the concept of a ‘public option’.
i agree. actually, i’d rather we started from single payer.