Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet President Barack Obama’s goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.
[]
On Monday, Mr. Emanuel said the trigger mechanism would also accomplish the White House’s goals. Under this scenario, a public plan would kick in under certain circumstances when competition was judged to be lacking. Exactly what circumstances would trigger the option would have to be worked out.
Let’s give an industry that has acted in complete bad faith a chance to get it right, and kick the can down the road a few years so that we can all wind up in a huge fight about whether the trigger standards have been met, hopefully in a Republican era when the entire mess can be rolled back.
Because Medicare Part D was such a huge success:
Language was inserted into the law that explicitly prohibited the government from directly negotiating with drug manufacturers for lower drug prices. That has meant billions of dollars in extra profits and an assurance that the government would not interfere in how they set their prices.
Their gain was our loss. As I explained in a previous post, evidence shows that the prices negotiated by the private Medicare Part D plans are substantially higher than prices that government-run programs like the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Medicare Part B, Medicaid and those in other countries are able to obtain for their patients. The private plans’ inability to secure better prices has meant higher costs for people with Medicare and for taxpayers.
Well, it’s good to know that Rahm is at least admitting that all that BS about controlling costs is just protection for private insurance companies, and that he’s looking to Republicans for solutions.
So he can what, finish the job of screwing the country he started with NAFTA?
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If Rahm is not speaking on behalf of his boss, it is up to his boss to say so.
The same goes for Biden’s green-lighting of an Israeli raid on Iran.
Oh, the drama of kabuki. If the suspense doesn’t kill you, the lack of healthcare will.
OT – John Orman has died. Froomkin is hired by Huff Po.
No one could have predicted …
Going backwards to Friday, is this why the White House met with Democrats on Friday to discourage pressure on centrist Democrats to support the public plan option? It appears to be that way.
Ugh.
So is this true or Rahm’s attempt to demoralize us?
I guess either way we have to redouble efforts. And it’s personal. I’m 41 and have no insurance. Without a public option, my only remedy is to stay health for 24 more years.
Do Obama and Emanuel think that insurance CEOs are insurance fairies? That CEOs are going to keep a promise to violate their fiduciary resonsibility to maximize profits by paying for as little healthcare for their customers as possible. Of course not. It’s all kabuki to keep entrenched interests entrenched.
This is just so tragic for the U.S. Pathetic is too kind a word.
Or you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get a haircut and get a real job, you DFH, cheeto-eating foul-mouthed fem-blogger! /s
It is getting hard to maintain a positive outlook on the Obama administration with this news.
After all the work & money to get him & Democratic Congress elected, this feels like a total betrayal.
I hold Obama responsible if my husband dies from lack of health care.
THIS. IS. RIDICULOUS. Like the insurance companies that have been screwing us for 25 years are going to just hop on board and do the right thing????
I think old Rahm needs to drop his federal health insurance, drop his salary to oh let’s say 25K or so a year and go on out and try and buy some insurance for him and his family. Or he can go to one of the zillions of web sites, put in some info and see what great offers he gets for healthcare coverage.
And Obama is WHERE???
Well, points for predictability, I guess…
Common Cause:
“The major health interests have spent an average of $1.4 million per day to lobby Congress so far this year and are on track to spend more than half a billion dollars by the end 2009.”
Money talks. Rahm listens.
Thanks President Obama, for appointing Rahm!
but c’mon, who is surprised anymore?
The Democrats role is to divert and neutralize impulses for real reform, then Least Worsters across the land go about proclaiming that the botched, kludged, flawed sellout they passed is infinitesimally better than having left things the way they were.
Because refuse is more palatable than excrement.
Rhetorical queston, buy why is a person with a dual citizenship the Chief of Staff to the President? How is that unlike bigamy? To which
wifecountry does he owe allegiance?This is indeed ridiculous. If insurance companies have $1.4 million a day to spend on lobbying, that means that their profits ARE OBSCENE. Whose bills did they not pay — patients’, doctors’, hospitals’ — to have that kind of cash at their disposal to buy Max Baucus, Rahm and company?
Do not confuse yourselves. Emanuel, Obama and Biden are all on the same page. They are all sh*theads ready to sell out the American public again. They are working hard to save the corporatists.
How about these for triggers:
46 million Americans Uninsured
or
More than 50% of those with health insurance covered by 3 or less companies in any given market
or
Greater than 10% increase in premiums in any one year.
in the rest of our lives we decline to dine on either refuse or excrement, neither a sawdust McBurger from Mcdonalds or a Lard Royale from Burger King.
why is it only in politics where one can pretend that the refuse is so tasty compared to the excrement the other guy has?
and also why the surprise and outrage at the latest greasy affront the Democrats serve up? its what they do!
The smiling smirking face of a traitor to the American people, a champion of the corporations.
Rham Tiny Dancer.
Biden is the real embarrassment. Coming from a working class background in Scranton, PA and Wilmington, DE, he’s a traitor to his roots.
Hope he does not have plans to return to Delaware soon, because he’s losing his welcome there.
Are the Wall Street Journal reporters reliable?
Since Murdoch purchased the WSJ, I have been more skeptical than I used to be and I used to be very skeptical of their reporting.
is he batshit out of his frigging mind?
It’s time for progressives to take on Rahm in the media. Some timely ads by MoveOn or others might begin to discredit this traitor to the American people.
I posted this on an earlier thread, but seems more appropriate here. A segment on NPR this morning:
My bold.
Jane,
Don’t scold me, but I’d like you to think about adding a 4th part to the Whip Pledge:
#4. In addition to not supporting any public option that isn’t nationwide on day one and answerable only to Congress and the voters I pledge to smack Rahm Emmanuel in the back of the head the next time I see him and say “What are you f’n crazy!?!?!”
is he batshit out of his frigging mind?
and I’m normally such a fan of rhetorical questions….
Sorry, can’t put link in edit. Here is the NPR segment.
It is hard to imagine a party with even LESS principles than the GOP but there you have it: they have continued to fund the wars through supplementals, they have refused to repeal don’t ask/don’t tell, they are continuing to defend DOMA (and comparing my gay friends’ relationships to pedophilia and incest), and now they are giving us all a royal fucking on health care reform. And after ALL THOSE PROMISES.
Did I hear Byron Dorgan say that it’s hard to get 60 people to agree about anything?
What a great idea. think I’ll write MoveOn and ask them to explore this possibility. And DFA too.
What in the world makes them think the Republicans are the least bit interested in creating health care reform?
If health care reform is a football, then the Republicans are Lucy Van Pelt. They wouldn’t vote for the bill if it promised to directly transfer monies from the Treasury to their corporate buddies. Oh, wait, that’s almost what is being proposed … except it’s from our personal treasuries to their corporate buddies. And the White House is Charlie Brown…
On to more important issues.
Is that a threat or a promise?
Curious then, that 75% of us rubes here in the sticks agree that the health care system is on life support and it’s time to pull the plug.
I think I’m seeing a pattern here:
- stage 1: Obama moots modest, conservative proposal
- stage 2: the modest proposal gets beat up by rethugs and conservadems and gets even more watered down to the point of absurdity (the measly $50 billion for infrastructure in the stimulus being only one example)
- stage 3: Obama tries to rebid the deal with a somewhat more aggressive one (his new proposal to break up the big banks after giving them the keys to the china shop and after they’ve already broken everything in it)
We’ve seen this happen so far on the car companies, on the banks, on the stim, on gitmo and, possibly, on Iraq and torture, ‘cept there we’re only on stage 2. My guess is we can look to see something like this happen here.. the “trigger” might be the rebid.. a year from now or whenever.
But what not do things right the first time around instead of giving up the farm and then trying to take back the barn after the fact? Color me confused.
Dear Brendan – they do it every time, it is what they do.
many have predicted that this is what would happen with a (D) President and a (D) congress:
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/
are they oracular? do they have a crystal ball?
no, they just operate on the assumption that the Democratic Party is working to further impose, expand and consolidate a form of corporate authoritarian rule in the United States.
and this assumption or hypotheses is routinely confirmed!
take it for a test drive sometime, it really works!
Sarah Palin says…..“if I die, I die. So be it.”
I believe that perris just made reference to the batshit insane?
See 19. This is for Blub.
From Politico
See my 35.
Obama’s intent is a football. The Republicans are Lucy Van Pelt. The White House is Charlie Brown.
We’re trapped in a Charles Schulz nightmare.
Trial balloon. It didn’t fly…
I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals.”
“Or not. Whatever…”
That’s just Ruskie talk…
So Rahm just does whatever he pleases???
WHAT. A. CLUSTERF–K.
Big Pharma and the H/C Insurers will promise anything knowing full well they already had the loopholes written and the checks ready to get them enacted.
Goldman Sachs ain’t the only one’s who are into the “long-term-greedy”.
Confusion Be Gone -
protracted debates equals protracted contributions period
oh and those pesky do-overs ? ‘mo money, ‘mo money, ‘mo . . .
That’s the other interpretation: Rahm’s gone off the reservation. Again.
The problem from our perspective is that we can’t know if Rahm’s off the rez or if Rahm’s sending up a trial balloon for Obama. The result in either case is the same: a correction from the President. I tend to think it was a trial balloon that didn’t fly, but I’ve no facts to back that opinion.
If he isn’t, or doesn’t want to go, where Rahm is, then he has some serious ass-kicking to do.
I firmly believe in what Mary said here. Rahm’s just the Mouth. The President is the only speaker. Rahm’s occasional tactlessness in choice of words might be “off the reservation” (BargainCountertenor) but never his message. Obama has a plan and Rahm’s job is to execute it, and that’s all he will ever do. The problem is, the President’s plans may not be particularly progressive or helpful to working people, in this case. We’re fooling ourselves if we think the President will somehow come to the rescue.
I’ve said before and I’ll say again: we knew precisely what Obama stood for when we elected him – moderate, a middle-of-the-road-consensus builder, to the right of Hillary. Why do we keep on trying to read into him more than this? He’s a heck of a lot better than the alternatives, which is why I voted for him in the generals… after having shouted here and elsewhere to no avail, month after month, about what he really stands for during the primaries. I’m really a little surprised by this “but Obama’s really a progressive he’s just gettin’ bad advice” meme that keeps on popping up in progressive circles.
In that case (which I doubt), Rahm needs to be publicly rebuked by the president. (The same holds for Biden and the green-lighting of an Israeli raid on Iran.)
The President’s mouth in on the left and his behavior on the center-right. “Handsome is as Handsome does.”
that’s right girls and boys, the Healthcare “Debate” has turned Baucus in to one of the leading Sugar Daddies
hey, did I mention former Baucus Chief of Staff is presently serving as WH Deputy Chief of Staff ?
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmsp…..0003148680
I think WaPo is going to be very sorry they kicked out Froomkin. He’s in a great position to let them have it, and I hope he does.
Maybe it’s time to start targeting some advertising dollars at the White House.
To be clear I do not believe that the president is opposed to the public option, by the way.. nor for that matter is he particularly supportive of it. He mainly just wants to get a healthcare bill done – almost any bill with enough meat they can call a victory, and the public option is “for sale” toward that end.
My concern here is that we’ve seen a pattern already where the president’s initial bid is so low that the deal that ultimately gets done falls well short of even what the president himself would’ve deemed an acceptable end – its a process issue more than one of substance. Then he tries to rebid the bad deal with triggers an’ what not to salvage it.
This process issue has nothing to do with whether he wants what we want. He doesn’t. But nor is he necessarily opposed to giving it to us in at least a somewhat acceptable package – we need to help him (through pressure on Congress and possibly on the admin itself) to cut the best possible deal that still fulfills his own stated wishes, instead of allowing them once again to be maneuvered into something even less acceptable – as happened already on the car companies, the stim and gitmo, amogn other things.
Beautifully said. And, unfortunately, I think true.
I doubt it too. Obama is trying to find a way to negotiate a bipartisan deal with the R’s. Fortunately, the R’s strategy of wallflowering works in our favor. If they were willing to dance, we might have worse problems than we’re having now.
Teddy Roosevelt once said of the Colombians, “You can no more negotiate with them than you can nail currant jelly to a wall.” The same applies to the current crop of Republicans, and the sooner the White House realizes and penalizes this bad behavior the better off we’ll be.
We already know there is no real competition except to see who can collect the most in premiums and deny the most in care.
Triggers, my ass, Emanuel is just trying to put lipstick on a pig or rather create a cover story for an enormous criminal con. Fucking monster…
Way to fly off the handle, Jane. Obama already walked this back, from freaking Russia. I swear some people here seem to want Obama to fail, so they can say ‘I told you so’ and remain morally superior. Emanuel is an asshole but he’s not the President. How many hundreds of WH staffers have said stuff over the years that their boss doesn’t actually believe? Geezus. Take a pill.
I’ve said much the same thing. Obama is a moderate, a conciliator, a negotiator. Negotiation is a natural to him as breathing.
He wants to reach solutions where everyone gets what they need. But sometimes those solutions don’t exist, and I think this is one of them.
“I’ve said before and I’ll say again: we knew precisely what Obama stood for when we elected him – moderate, a middle-of-the-road-consensus builder, to the right of Hillary”.”
The only consensus he seems to be interested in is one of corporations, their lobbyists, Republicans and DINO’s. To call that middle-of-the-road is only correct if one says it while pointing to the right shoulder.
oh no, sir: I knew this was going to happen, and have been saying so since the election.
anyone who expected health care reform from the democrats (you know, the folks who passed the fisa amendments act, just paid for another few years in Iraq via supplemental, bailed out all those banks, no strings attached, and now embrace Arlen Specter) was crazy.
they are liars plain and simple and people should spit on them in the streets.
which is why we need to raise the stakes in that negotiation process, by outlining our position clearly and keeping up the pressure for a progressive stance here (and I think this is exactly what Jane is recommending we do.. please tell me if I’m wrong). It is not that the president is opposed to our agenda. He isn’t. He just doesn’t care enough about our agenda to support it, unless we make it so inconvenient to ignore us that he needs to include our BASELINE proposal into the starting point of his process of negotiation/compromise/reconciliation. Its all about political baselines.. and all about strategy. Our job is to make ourselves inconvenienet. And in doing so, strengthen the president’s hand.
I disagree. He’s not malicious.. he’s just a little indifferent to what we want, instead of being outright hostile to it. The corporatists are at the table, but so is anybody else who has demonstrated that they can exert a clearly articulated political will here. We just need to make sure that we’re at the table, and that means being very loud, willful, inconvenient, etc. He doesn’t care one thwat whether we are the table or not.. that’s our problem.
The Replicans are very disciplined, and I doubt that any of them will break ranks — they have ways of punishing those who do.
The White House tactic should be to reward Republicans who break ranks, and punish Dems who do.
Surely you know how well the Medicare Drug Benefit is working? It’s in that BigPharma TV ad that tells people how well it’s working and how everyone should tell congress they want a workable affordable health care plan for all Americans.
They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?
Sure, I’m all for it. I’m working on it, too.
Obama is letting the Congress write the law, which is how it’s supposed to work. Unfortunately, Congress got out of the habit of legislating over the last 16 years or so.
There are other ways of punishing the bad behavior.
One good one would be to push a strong health care bill through the Senate via budget reconciliation. Politics is the art of the possible, and this is possible.
Now if we could just get more people to realize and accept this as fact. Kind of like a 1st step for recovering Democrats – the party consists of totally untrustworthy sycophants who are interested in nothing but hearing themselves speak and preening for the camera – I’m looking at you Schumer.
ot – franken was sworn in!!!!! there’s a post on fdl running about it.
If this pattern of RINO (reform in name only) continues, I’m bailing on Obama in 2012. No money, no volunteering, no vote.
We Must have Single Payer public option as you said so well Jane these bastards, repukes, big Pharma & Health insurance have milked the public for enough profits! Time they have actual competition from a Public Option, of course they will fail and I think they should!! I would like nothing better than to see all the Health care insurance worker bees brought into the public plan to administer it at 1/10th the cost of the current system of huge profits and bonuses for the top executives!!
Single Payer or Bust!!
I’m sure Rahm knows how far his leash extends. Obama did issue a statement that could be interpreted as walking back Rahm’s statement, but Obama’s statement contains enough weasel words that he could also be endorsing Rahm’s words. Being unequivocal is not Obama’s strong suit.
wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just giving obama cover for what the latter wanted all along.
MoveOn is captive to the Obama administration. Don’t want to get disinvited from those cocktail parties after all.
It isn’t demoralising the left. It’s pissing them off and getting them really riled. It’s actually having the opposite effect.
Seriously, President Obama really needs to sharpen his message. Biden and Rahm are such loose cannons.
no – that isn’t a repudiation. Those are weasel words designed to confuse. Please notice how they are open to interpretation, and those who interpret this as a “walkback” are interpreting in the most favorable light.
Rahm’s and Obama’s statements are quite similar about the need for competition. Obama’s is phrased more politely, but it does not expressly reject the idea of a trigger.
cheers to you and james!
more and more folks are beyond disgusted with the Hope-n-Change bait-n-switch the Democrats pull every election cycle.
Rahm only made a few million during the time between Clinton and Obama
How can you say he loves money.