Surprise! They're bogus. They reproduce the same "bait and switch" tactics that "progressives" used to help the Obama administration take single payer off the table.
I'm shocked. And so are the American people, but without the irony:
The New York Times reported on Saturday, October 17, that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is warning his constituents that the “public option” is not going to be available to the great majority of Americans. No one who has actually read the Senate health committee’s “reform” bill or the House “reform” bill (HR 3200) disputes this. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “option” will be available only to about 30 million people, or about one American in ten. As the Times put it (slightly inaccurately), the “option” in the Democrats’ legislation “would be out of bounds to the approximately 160 million people already covered through employers.”
Does the public understand this? According to Wyden, they don’t. Wyden says his constituents are shocked when they are told the “option” will not be available to the vast majority of Americans. When he began informing his constituents about this truth last summer, “They nearly fell out of the bleachers,” he said (“And the public option is….,” New York Times, October 17, 2009, A10).
Well, that's how the inside game is played, I suppose:
The "noble lie." Of all Sauron's works, the only fair...
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I can't even hear the words "public option"
without wondering what the person is talking about (or if, in fact, that person has any idea).
And, as we've mentioned a zillion times before, there are the strange "robust"/"strong" variants of the public option that people say they want or "won't settle for less than"—are those the mythical "bait" versions of the public option or are they even "better" versions or one of the many possible versions? (People can't even get the "original" one right.)
And then we overlay that with polls to see what everyone "thinks" within this morass of confusion, confounding the situation even further.
It's like some whacked-out experiment in "communication theory"—or maybe "miscommunication theory" or maybe even "disinformation theory"—being played out in the real world of health care reform.
How anyone can take these polls even remotely seriously enough to quote them is beyond me.
Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.—Sheldon Wolin
I had the same reaction
do the supporters of the Public Option have any idea what is proposed by either HR 3200 or the Senate HELP bill? Certainly high traffic bloggers have not made any effort to inform them.