UPDATE ii: Gosh, did I hit a nerve?
UPDATE: Still don't get it. From AHIP's point a view a viable public option is just as deadly to their business model as HR 676.
I convinced the tens of millions of progressive activists who are familiar with the work of Jacob Hacker that, while Congress was not going to pass single-payer, Democrats could pass a public option that would cover 130 million Americans. Like most public option advocates, I wrote about that all the time during 2007 and 2008, just around the same time that Hacker was becoming a household name.
But as Robert Parry pointed out:
To understand the financial stakes involved in the battle over U.S. health-care reform, it’s useful to keep two numbers in mind: 50 million and 119 million.
The first number is the approximate total of Americans without health insurance, a new market that the private health insurance industry is salivating to get its hands on. The industry’s hope is that the government will mandate that those Americans sign up for private insurance and offer subsidies for those who can’t afford to pay the premiums.
Fifty million new customers and government largesse to help pay the bills would be a huge windfall for the insurance industry, which otherwise faces a decline in its market because Baby Boomers are reaching the age to qualify for Medicare and because rising unemployment is draining the pool of Americans who have insurance through their employers. ...
... But Dionne and other mainstream analysts miss the significance of the other number – 119 million – and why it is even a more powerful incentive for private insurers to have the ear of key members of Congress and White House insiders. It is the figure that the industry and its backers cite as the potential exodus of disaffected customers to a public health insurance option.
From AHIP's point of view there was no difference between HR 676 and the public option. A true public option would have put them out of business as easily as HR 676. So the politics of the two were the same from the industry's point of view. From our point of view there is a big difference. HR 676 is specific, if is easy to explain, difficult to demonize and easy to document. You are not talking about a concept, you are talking about a specific piece of legislation. Precisely because the public option was never anything but an advertising slogan, it was easy to demonize. It carries all the baggage of HR 676 with none of the political strengths. There was nothing practical about this.
- DCblogger's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Front page
Comments
Liberals should be redefining "practical"
If they are worth a damn.
Just saying. But I stopped being and advocate of the "we just need more congressional seats" strategy (so-called) when Dems won in 2006 and failed to act as boldly as they claimed they would. What do I know.
For the record, Lammy, DCB and Hip (and others) seem to be working pretty hard to redefine what political feasibility is. I appreciate their efforts and the fact that they aren't chickenshit liberals!
That's been the point all along
Thanks for bringing this point of the industry seeing the idea of a public option and HR 676 the same. The point being that if it's the same demon, in their eyes, we might as well take all that we can get and run them over with it since they think it's the same evil. That's always been the basic point about choosing the best instead of choosing the next best. If they aren't bargaining in good faith to begin with, and if they are going to oppose any plan with a public option, what do we have to gain by half-assing it?
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
The
public options which are in the bills are not dangerous to their business model. Sure, a robust one would be, and a viable one might be, but these aren't the first and probably aren't the second.