If we could get an end to rescissions and discrimination on the basis pre-existing conditions

that’s what we had in MA prior to our 2006 reform with its mandates and exchange (which was supposed to control costs – ha!).

p.s. another amen for your earlier comment:

That 76% includes the 58% whose first choice is Medicare for All, so pure public option supporters ampount to only 18% at best, and it’s a good bet that many of those have the PO confused with Medicare for All.

JFC, Lambert. You are a broken record.

i’m sure the people who answer the phones at our representative’s offices think the very same thing about us. doesn’t mean we stfu though.

more importantly what we are doing here is what jay rosen calls overcoming audience atomization.

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

p.s. completely agree with your later statement:

The big error for progressives and liberal Democrats was to let single payer be excluded from the table at the outset. Because unlike the public option, Medicare for All has been a growing movement for at least the last 20 years with tens of thousands of doctors and nurses behind it. The public option doesn’t have a movement. Most people, even those who support it, can’t define it.

It’s that reflexivity George Soros talks about, affecting and constraining and determining what’s possible, even though reflexivity is just ourselves predicting the future and arrogantly assuming that we’re right even though the future, when it finally arrives, frequently shows us that we were wrong after all.

agree completely.

p.s. have been reading and enjoying your diaries on the subject.

Playing with the insiders is a necessary role in reform, but so is fighting for what the majority of the citizens of a democracy want.

imo this is a really important statement. thanks.

pre-compromise on aug 13, 2008 — almost one year ago.

confirmed feb 1, 2009

You tell me how we get 15 Blue Dogs first. Then we can have that conversation.

this is EXACTLY the church of the savvy as jay rosen has described it (maybe even the central dogma, although i don’t remember if jay has ever used that term).

and it means our conversation on healthcare is limited to exclude the questions and issues single payer advocates have raised about even the PUBLIC OPTION (let alone single payer) — both the policy and politics — because single payer advocates don’t currently have the votes for their preferred policy objective.

three years ago, in the progressive blogosphere, single payer was firmly at center of the circle of progressive consensus. and now we’re fighting just to get it back into the circle of legitimate debate. it wasn’t the grass roots that decided single payer universal healthcare should be thrown into the circle of deviance — that was the church of savvy (comments like “extremist” and “single payer or die” are indications of where — circle of deviance or cicle of legitimate debate — one places the issue and/or the person).

as a result, people who really know the subject matter — people like steffie woolhandler and david himmelstein (elizabeth warren’s coauthors on the medical bankruptcy studies!) or kip sullivan or drsteveb and many others — have been completely ignored, as though they don’t even exist, although they have long been writing and continue to write about the issue. we’re actually ignoring our best experts in favor of neoliberal talking points. yikes!