I am very sorry that you are so energetically flogging this bogus, self-defeating “public option” con. Do you actually think Congress would enact legislation that in any way undercuts the private insurance companies –who are the problem? A realist knows the “public option” won’t work and “single payer” will. You shouldn’t be selling out single payer — you should be whipping up support for it, fighting to make politicians do what the people want. You are actually undermining those who might stand up for single payer by creating a route for people to turn against it. As Helen Redmond wrote in Counterpunch, the attitude of those who claim single payer can’t be won is like those “who would have said under slavery, “We can’t win abolition, so let’s settle for a few reforms that make the lives of slaves more bearable.”

Well said.

Why do I have the feeling that whatever “healthcare plan” comes out of the House will be worse than what we have now, if that’s possible?

i agree with this point of view.

as in, “don’t fix it, it’s broken enough”?

Well said ?!?!

are ya all on the phone advocating Single Payer ?!?!

and do either of you have record somewhere of Jane Hamsher stating Single Payer Can’t Be Won ?!?!? can you find me anything any-effin’-where on this site wherein Single Payer Advocacy is dissuaded ??

for Dog’s sake, we are talking to the 83 Co Sponsors of HR 676, ya know, Single Payer

for the record, we are a working poor, under insured family standing firmly behind Single Payer – and I just finished my 25th-ish call in this Action.

asking Critters to draw a line in the sand against any Corp suggested compromises is not the same as discarding Single Payer

unfriggin’ believable – no good deed . . .

Any “public plan” will have so many poison pills attached to it it’ll be worthless, while at the same time the insurance companies will get all the protection they need to continue killing the American public for profit. Single payer is the only acceptable solution.

in light of Jane’s Doggett’s tale, have you called your critter today ??

yes, that’s what i meant by “don’t fix it, it’s broken enough”.

i’m glad to see the literate explanation with the specifics of the situation. i don’t come anywhere close to trusting a public option. so far, in the discussion i’ve seen, single payer is the only reform i’d actually trust to be a reform.

no, i need to collect myself from off the floor before i’ll be able to do that. i’m heartsick about that post of jane’s and other events in my life right now. i thought i’d come to fdl for the moment to take my mind off my own life. doggett almost always is on the same side of an issue as i am and stays on the same side.

i’ve called doggett so many times in the last few weeks for so many things, i should really put him on speed dial.

Grijalva’s hot stuff, but I’m not sanguine about his ability to whip the CPC into uniformity. My congresswoman’s Senior Legislative Counsel needed me to spell out what CPC stood for and was unfamiliar with the CPC’s criteria for a robust public option, even though the congresswoman belongs to the caucus.

Also, although my congresswoman’s as progressive as they come, she succumbed to White House and Pelosi arm-twisting on the Supplemental vote. She’s a frosh, and I don’t blame her for not holding enough political capital to hold firm; and I despair that she’ll cave on an “impure” public option as well.

(My thoughts on the suckiness of even a robust public option need not be repeated, yet again, on this site, at least for today.)

apparently, we are in similar boats – came over here to chill after a coupla less than stellar responses from critters – and pretty much got the same thing here – lol

Doggett’s staff stated his support for Public Option but wouldn’t commit to voting against anything

You are a little harsh. As Conyers says, everything is everything. It would be nice if there were a 4th principle, that no federal plan be passed that prohibited the states from enacting their own single payer plans. There is single payer legislation pending in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Even if we cannot win it at the federal level, there is a real chance we can win it in one or more states, unless Obama, Rahm, Baucus & Co muck it up.

the staff never have him committing to anything and i just wasn’t prepared this morning for being able to hear it again. thanks for the update and your fortitude.

i’m also not up to expressing my displeasure that he voted for the energy bill. i think he was right to be against it in the first place.

I find myself following along here and wondering; if not a viable public option plan, what does the first step toward single payer look like? How else do we get from private insurance to single payer? I could not respond to that comment @ 1 because of my confusion. Surely nobody thinks there will be no transition?

Hey Cbl.

Call that fuck carter again.

The moronic FL legislature won’t even remove ostrich feed from the tax exemption list, which is longer than the taxable list. Their big move to increase revenue was to put a buck a pack tax on cigs. The counties are increasing dl and tag fees about 200%. State sponsored single payer in FL? Prolly not in my lifetime.

yeah, and if the Democratic Party of today was around then, any discussion of ending slavery would have to include slaveholders, cotton industry people, the slave-ship captains association, and the whip and shackle manufacturers groups.

they could work out 2 compromise reform plans, one with voluntary measures to make shorter whips, and maybe no whipping on Sundays, and the other plan would subsidize slaveholders to provide 10 minute breaks on wednesdays if the temperature was over 100 degrees.

would the people of faith, risking their freedom running the Underground Railroad to Canada, making arduous trips under cover of night, have haggled their Congresspeople of the day in favor of either such flawed, fake reforms?

imagine trying to explain the need to always settle for the Least Worst to a dedicated anti-slavery volunteer.

And, single-payer is vastly, massively more popular now than the campaign against slavery was.

Democratic Party ruses and bait-n-switches are the biggest obstacle to achieving meaningful health-care reform – and this ‘public option’ thingamajigg they are kludging together sure seems like another doomed hoax of a reform.

that’s a comparison that brings the issue home nicely!

Sorta OT, but part of the bigger health care picture.

The following I found from Monday’s abbreviated pundit wrap up over at the Great Orange Satan. It’s a snippet from a recent NYT editorial:

Congressional committees heard a lot this month about the devious schemes used by health insurance companies to drop or shortchange sick patients. It was a damning portrait — and one Americans know from painful personal experience — of an industry that all too often puts profits ahead of patients.

Well, there’s yer “Bingo!” right at the end, and explains why a single payer/public option component is a must.

Private insurance is always gonna put profits ahead of patients — it’s their reason for existence.

Blaming an insurance co. for making a profit is like blaming a hungry shark for eating you if you’re in the water at the wrong time.

It’s what both are programmed to do.

Nothing personal.

In Canada they passed it in one of the provinces and it worked so well it was adopted by the whole country. So, we could get to single payer that way. Which is why it is so critical that Congress pass no plan that prohibits states from enacting their own plans.

If you haven’t seen If Lincoln Approached Emancipation the Way Obama Approaches Health Care, it kinda sorta precisely makes your point.

The “fourth principle” you describe is embodied in Bernie Sanders’s S. 898.

congresscritters & their staffs are masters at evasion.

back when I was contacting then Sen Obama’s staffers to see if he was opposed to the loathsome Military Commissions Act, thats all I got, evasions.

And sure enough, as President, he will repeal and roll back none of it. So long, habeas corpus, been good to know ya!

Ha! That is a great parody. thx I had not seen it.

What I am trying to do — and what an emancipation option will help do — is put affordable freedom within reach for millions of slaves.

youch!

We should be asking Senators to co-sponsor 898.

I see one of the commenters at Oxdown was doing his usual let’s do nothing, everything’s fine as is trolling thing.

We are but they’re scared to death of anything involving Bernie. He has his constituent’s best interests in mind and that conflicts with the ethics of the Senate.

A classic little cartoon from Tom Tomorrow:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_R…..reform.gif

from 1994!

404 Error Not Found

Back to the cesspool.

Namaste

sorry – it works when I copy/paste it directly here, but the blogger software compresses it a bit, and the main 2bp blog is gone.

his new one on salon is here, though:

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/06/30/tomo/

Someone leaked info about the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s public option proposal.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo…..hp?ref=fpb

We should be asking Senators to co-sponsor 898.

i second that.

Selise, someone should really do a post on legislative red-headed stepchildren in the health reform debate, including (beyond HR 676), S. 898, HR 193, probably S 703, and others even more obscure.

I’d volunteer, but

a. I’m not an expert, and
b. I have neither the skill nor the heart to Photoshop a Ronald McDonald wig onto miniralphbon.

How wonderful that you are going to launch a full-on campaign for single payer! I think that’s great. Where are you headquartered? Will you be working full time on it? Do you have a website and a plan, or all your efforts going to be focused on our comments section?

For the record, I don’t consider that commenter a troll any more than I do another frequent commenter who often tears into I/P posts by Leen. Both may occasionally take cheap shots, but then so do I, and at other times they make arguments worth considering and analyzing before decimating.

The full-on campaigns already exist, Jane, thank-you very much, and if certain major progressive organizations and unions hadn’t jumped onto the compromise bandwagon so quickly last year, but instead supported the organizations that have been working on single-payer since before HCAN was a gleam in Jacob Hacker’s wonky eye, the arguments we’d be seeing in Congress today would have been jolted several notches to the left and we might actually have a crack at a public option with a chance of transitioning into something meaningful. My personal involvement in this movement has extended beyond commenting, as you can read, eg, here , here, and here.

Despite my strong doubts about the value of the exercise, I have nonetheless supported the CPC and am waiting to hear back from my congresswoman as part of your whip effort.

The snideness of your comment is symptomatic of the problematic, and I argue, ultimately nonstrategic, attitude adopted by increasingly tetchy public option advocates.

And with insurers you have the pleasure of paying for it.

1) I’m well aware of single payer efforts and am very much in support of them
2) Have never understood why it is “single payer now or die,” and why the efforts of others who think that the most feasible way to get to single payer is through a public plan must be denigrated, called “bogus” and a “sellout,” and that something productive is achieved by showing up here and pissing on them, but there you go
3) Not one member of Congress — not one single member of Congress — who supports single payer AS I DO will agree to vote against anything that doesn’t have single payer. Let’s say it again — NOT ONE MEMBER OF CONGRESS. So if you’re going to launch a time consuming and labor intensive campaign to get them to do so, please let me know, and I’ll happily support you with links, nothing “snide” about it. If those efforts are concentrated in our comments section, my guess is it’s going to travel under their radar.

Jane, who here is demanding that legislators draw a line in the sand at HR 676 and refuse to vote for anything that falls short? And who here is “pissing” on single-payer supporters, like yourself and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who are open about their desire for single payer and are trying to pass the most single-payer-reader version of public option that they can? Some of us do advocate more rigorous lines in the sand than advocated in your whip operation, but that’s a productive debate.

It’s the public option boosters like Obama, Sibelius, and HCAN national leadership, who denigrate single payer as too “disruptive” and swear on a stack of bibles that the public option will never, ever transition to single payer who I have issues with. I wouldn’t exactly say that I “piss” on them, but that’s partly a function of a prostate condition whose proper treatment my COBRA won’t cover.

Have never understood why it is “single payer now or die,”

jane, it’s not.

it’s single payer or something, anything, else that makes sense. and a public option doesn’t make sense to everyone. there are very significant problems with the hypothetical / theoretical public-plan-in-a-multi-payer-system route that have never, to my knowledge, been addressed although they have been raised again and again (including by people like elizabeth warren’s collaborators, david himmelstein and steffie woolhandler).

i’d love to be persuaded that a public option won’t be a massive fail (and hated if there is a mandate). but so long as that is what i think (even while hoping there are grounds for your optimism and that i’m massively wrong), it seems to me important to keep talking about single payer. so, i’m happy to make phone calls in support of your whipping action but i also want to keep pointing out, yes in the comments, that a public option is not single payer, that having insurance isn’t the same as having access to healthcare, why i think the public option is the insurance industry compromise and single payer universal healthcare is the progressive policy that could work, etc. not because i think some congressional staffer is going to see it, but because i think ideas matter and i value the opportunity to discuss the issue with other concerned people here.

It’s too late to comment on the site of the Lincoln Abolition analogy, but my opinion is that it’s a piece of historical crap.

Fact is, Lincoln’s approach to abolition WAS almost EXACTLY like Obama’s timid approach to Health Care reform. He constantly bent over backwards to find a compromise plan that would be acceptable to slaveholders, without ever finding any takers. There were several “compensated emancipation” schemes and colonization schemes proposed by Lincoln – “bringing slaveholders to the table indeed” – and none of them went anywhere. And Lincoln in fact used language almost precisely like your supposed parody.

They weren’t stupid, the slaveholders, they chose to fight rather than let themselves be put on “the slow road to extinction”. Abolitionists tore their hair out about Lincoln’s temporizing.

And yet, somehow, he got it done. Eventually, under the cover of military necessity it got done.

Which is not to say that left criticism of Obama’s temporizing over health care is misplaced. Pressure on Obama from the left on health care is NECESSARY and I support Jane Hamsher’s effort here. But false comparison to a supposedly steadfast Lincoln are ridiculous. Henry Louis Gates has a new book about Lincoln. I strongly recommend you read it before you post more foolishness like this.