GoldbergBlog

I’m Sick of Obama’s Health Care Duplicity

[Update: The White House says Obama is still committed to the Public Option.  We'll see.]

This article published last night by The Huffington Post pretty much confirms my fears about Obama’s strategy concerning health care.  His administration has sided, certainly in this crucial legislation directly concerning the lives and welfare of the American people, with the policy of looking good rather than being good.  It answers my big question in the weeks following his big speech on health care on September 14th: Where did our President go? It’s been almost six weeks since then and other than a blitz of interviews with talk show hosts, both of the cable news networks and late night, Obama has been MIA.  The news of the health care battle hasn’t been Obama calling senators into his office or even continuing public support of the positions he voiced in his eloquent address to the joint-session of Congress.  The news has been about bickering in Senate and Democrats in the House showing a backbone and saying they won’t support legislation that doesn’t have a public option.

The situation with the public option grows worse by the day.  Used as a starting point rather than the true reform a single-payer system would provide, a public option is still better than nothing because nothing is about to win.  Looking more cowardly than Harry Reid is a remarkable accomplishment but the Obama administration managed to pull it off.  The Senate is advocating an “opt-out” program because why take responsibility for health care when you can pass the buck to the individual states?  “Not getting health care?  We’d love to give it to you but your state government isn’t going for it.  Elect Democrats because we want you get health care, provided it’s politically convenient, and probably even then we’ll manage to find a way to fuck it up because lets face it: we’re Democrats.”  If your state government is run by the Republicans or “moderate” Democrats then don’t hold your breath for health care because when you pass out from oxygen deprivation and have to go to the emergency room, you’ll go bankrupt and drive up costs for everyone else since your state won’t have a public option.

But according to HuffPo, the Obama administration wants something even weaker: the “trigger” system. Here’s how it would work:

A trigger would implement a public option only if insurance companies failed to meet certain benchmarks over time and it would only be implemented in the regions of the country where those benchmarks weren’t met.

That’s nothing.  That’s basically half a year working to achieve the status quo.  How can you possibly stress the urgency of health care reform and say that the reform will come only if things stay bad or get worse.  Things are bad right now and they’re getting worse!  And we all know that trigger will never be pulled and even if it was, we’re still back to the problem of a state-by-state basis as if the whole country wasn’t suffering; as if health insurance companies weren’t killing the American people while their government sat idly by.

There is no pragmatism in this.  There’s no point in catering to Blue Dogs to keep control of the Senate when that control has been seceded to those Blue Dogs instead of maintained by the White House.  There’s no point in passing the buck because we can see when responsibility has been abdicated.  And if the White House seriously thinks that the American people won’t notice how this farce of a bill hasn’t improved their lives one iota, then all they’ve accomplished is proving that this administration is pointless.

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