Clue stick: any usage of "public option" preceded by "a" or "the" is erroneous
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Submitted by vastleft on Sat, 08/14/2010 - 7:14am
"Public option" refers to no fixed thing.
It denotes no specific policy. No breadth of access. No specific impact on for-profit insurance. No nothing.
Since the ink dried on Jacob Hacker's "public option" paper, the term has become an infinitely malleable wild-card, representing as expansive or unassuming a program concept as one imagines... or wishes to trick the beholder into imagining.
It's the stuff that long and short cons are made of.
There is no "a" "public option," there is no "the" "public option."
Every time you cite one, you're contributing to a deadly lie.
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Comments
Disagree
Mainstream bloggers from the Obama branch of the Democratic party were vague and conciliatory on the public option. THEY never bothered to define what it was they wanted. I am not even sure any of them knew. I got the impression more of them were concerned with not giving Nancy, Harry or Barack a hard time then actually enacting policy.
That being said, there were people who believed in a public option who weren't vague and weren't afraid of having an entire discussion on health care that included single payer. I have always been pretty clear in my posts what kind of public option I wanted and why.(A federal option encompassing at least 10% of the population similar in its scope to Medicare.) The Democrats lost me early on when they made it extremely clear that a public option would look fairly similar to the Medicaid plans(state run and constantly throwing folks on and off it due to funding) that are used as a political football and from what I have heard are incredibly hard to find providers for. If I stump for policy I stump for effective policy, not vague notions. And I don't accept rewritten history either.
Outside of Hacker's paper was there...
any persistent, irreducible definition of "PO," a set of characteristics which if lost or compromised away would have been widely and instantly spotted as shenanigans, as non-strong and non-robust?
That certainly didn't happen when Obama mused about a "PO" for maybe 5% of Americans at most.
That you had your own personal "PO" objective doesn't absolve the overall "PO" exercise of being a bait-and-switch and/or an invitation for one.
I'd make the same point more strongly
It's the fact that there are individuals with their own precise definition for [a|the]? [strong|robust]? public [health insurance]? [option|plan] that shows the absence of such precision at the level of institutional advocacy -- which is VL's point.
I must agree...
For example, when you say "the New Deal," people know what it was. That was a well-defined public policy.
You wouldn't have your own personal interpretation of "the New Deal." If you did, people would point to the polcy and tell you where you were wrong.
The same logic does not apply to our Sparkle Pony friend. The words "public option" were a catchall for whatever people wanted Health Care Reform to be. Like Barack Obama, they were a blank screen onto which others projected their desires and characteristics.
Forgive me if I'm off-base here, but I think there's a "won't get fooled again" aspect that VL is capturing. Next time "progressives" all go nuts over something or someone, take a very close look at what they're actually doing. Their motives and goals may not be the same as yours, and the opportunity cost of joining them might be too high.
Mostly about *this* time
(and each time "PO" rears its nonexistent head).
It's pretty depressing to see, for example, that virtually no one notices in the Gibbs "professional left" affair that every yardstick put forth by so-called lefties was weak or non-existent tea, notably mourning the lack of the "public option" placebo.
The basic, obvious truth -- the infinite slipperiness of "PO" -- remains wholly unknown.
From whom?
Inside the beltway? Of course not. If there had been then it would have been counter to what the corporate overlords wanted.
Any real effort to define public option was met with pushback from insurance industry, in much the same way Medicare for All experienced pushback.
That being said there were more than 1 or 2 people who were for a public option who had clear parameters on what they wanted and what they were willing to accept.
Carrying things too far
Hi VL, are you really saying that if someone uses the term "the Public Option," to refer to the general concept of any: new government-owned insurance bureaucracy that would offer health insurance in competition with private insurers through a Government regulated exchange," for the purpose of saying that any variation on this general idea is "off the table" for the future, that such a person is ". . . contributing to a deadly lie"?
Are you also meaning to say that anytime such a person uses the term "a public option" to refer to any and all members of the set defined just above, for the purpose of saying that any variation on this general idea is "off the table" for the future, that such a person is ". . . contributing to a deadly lie"?
On the face of it, I think either of these two claims is ridiculous. So you must be saying something else, but I don't have the faintest idea what.
On Friday, I ended my post on the PO (general idea) by saying:
Just how a statement like that is ". . . contributing to a deadly lie" is beyond me, in spite of your attempt to explain yourself in the present post. Nor have I found madamab's and Lambert's statements on the subject any more illuminating.
I think we all agree that the term "PO" and the vague and ambiguous use of the idea was used against Medicare for All supporters all through the hcr campaign. I've written as extensively as any of you about how that was done in a series of blogs beginning much before I joined Correntewire and began to post here, making copious use of Kip Sullivan's early analyses of the bait and switch involved in the PO, and later doing my own analysis of the reflexive downward political spiral accompanying the politics of the PO.
I've always been against the vague and ambiguous use of the term. But, as I said, the contention that all references to "the PO" or "a PO", even to condemn proposing it in future hcr political contexts, are ". . . contributing to a deadly lie" just makes me laugh.
The "public option" was, literally and exactly...
a "Big Lie" (though, granted, in a far more sophisticated and "knowing" media and political context).
Big Lies tend to be deadly, no?
It was a big lie
in regards to pols who never intended to actually have a real discussion on health care. As far as "all bloggers who advocated for a public option", many of us who had tangible beliefs on what a real public option might look like were not guilty og lying or contributing to malice at all. As a matter of fact, more than one of us felt that it was unfair from the get go to take Medicare off the table in discussions. It's unfair to paint all public option supporters with a broad brush because of the failure of the paid for progressives to actually quantify the public option(which despite that was something the majority still wanted during a large portion of the debate)
"PO" is poisoned fruit
Its defining characteristics are:
* its infinite redefinability
* its vague, reassuring sense of representing legitimate policy, regardless of how fully it's redefined down to nothing
We need to learn that such terms (see also "God," "patriotism," "support our troops," and "hope and change") are deeply dangerous. They are lie machines, even when used by those with a clear personal sense of what they represent and with the most wholesome of intentions.
Such terms invite those with power and ill intent to pacify us as long as the infinitely elastic term is invoked.
This is not to paint all those who served this fruit as Borgias. Far from it. But it is an ill fruit nonetheless, and its broad propagation through the Year of Health Care Reform is truly going to kill people. Thoughtful people will disassociate themselves from this rotten apple of fake policy, even at the cost of chagrin for having once accepted it.
It's not easy to distance oneself from what one once thought was decent or much better, as those who have renounced their lifetime religions and political parties know well. But I encourage you to realize that your private conceptualization of a good and meaningful "public option" is a sucker bet and worse, because every legitimization of "PO" is a legitimization of a deadly Big Lie.
More
Re:
I'm quite sure the vast majority of proponents of their own personal "public option" conception weren't deliberately lying (other than, perhaps, to themselves), and that few did it with malice (except, in many cases toward single-payer advocates who posed a threat to the Precious).
I have absolutely no reason to think you had any ill intent in your advocacy for a "public option" thingamajig, any deliberate lying or anything remotely like malice. That you called shenanigans on the shunning of single-payer discussion is admirable.
Your honesty and intentions, though, do not mitigate the perniciousness of the "PO" meme. That's a bitter pill to gulp down, I know, and it's human nature not to want to swallow it. It can't seem anything but rude for some C-list blogger to prescribe it.
Doesn't this tickle your Spidey sense as worrisome? A majority craves something -- on a life and death policy issue -- that has absolutely no fixed definition. Isn't that exactly where Power wants us?
Hey, some people swear by Three-Card Monte
It tends to be the dealers, but that's just a fine point.
The broad brush
I agree with VL's "worrisome" above:
And yes, it is. Tactically, I think I'll try to confine the more savage indictments to 'career "progressives".' The mechanism whereby other, more disinterested advocates projected their own desires for precision onto the "blank screen" of the so-called "public option" is worthy of study, but the careerism is surely not there (and no, tribalism is not a complete answer).
We fall again into the language problem that English has with classes. It's extremely difficult not to paint with a broad brush because our concepts of categories don't easily include fuzzy edges, changes over time, partial and not complete membership, and on and on and on.
UPDATE More: In terms of 12 principles, VL gives the reasoning why precision in policy proposals is important for those without power (ie, 99%). "And we get?"
I'm unaware that I've called out "PO" citers as a class
Nor have I been fool or jerk enough to suggest that most glommed onto "public option" for ill reasons.
I've called out a pernicious term wrongly accepted as legitimate by many people, most well-intentioned and some otherwise, that has enabled the PTB to game HCR.
Barring a case to made that I'm wrong, that "PO" represents something with valuable and consistent meaning, I urge folks to desist from treating it as anything other than a toxic Big Lie.