Yves here. The Administration signaled very clearly it that the public option was a mere trading chip. How? They called it….the “public option”! It’s an incredibly lame name, not the sort you’d ever use if you were serious about rallying public support. This is an Administration very attuned to marketing and positioning (the headfake HAMP mortgage mod program had its own logo and website as soon as it was launched, and consider the clever branding of the empty “stress tests”).
Double fucking pony bonus bingo.
And it takes an econoblogger, blogging like it's 2003, to say call the bullshit, and not some clapped out access blogger servicing whichever faction of whichever legacy party. What does that tell you?
NOTE Do read the whole thing: It's titled DC For Sale: Health Care and Financial Services as Case Studies.
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Actually, it did fine at "rallying support"
It rallied support away from a real goal to a meaningless goal, as designed.
Just like a roach motel lures critters away from more fulfilling objectives.
Cute, but nah
Pretty much all labels for the idea, including those predating Obama's election (like Hacker's "public plan choice"), were pathetic and cardboard-flavored. The timidity was baked in from the get-go on purpose so as not to stoke the imaginary fears embodied by Celinda Lake's imaginary majority.
Only when the public plan proved truly theatened, last summer, did charlatans like Howard Dean ramp up the branding with vitamin-fortified phrases like "Medicare for All Who Want It" at precisely the point when the only public plans in play had become homeopathically dilute.
"homeopathically dilute"
LOL!
But hey! Enough with the appeals to prejudice!
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Single Payer had to be "off the table" lesat Medicare be used as
the template for what would actually work well for providing health CARE, not health insurance "reform." Obama talked about health insurance reform almost from the gitgo, and he got just what he wanted (or was told to achieve).
Corporatists won big on this. Which my be why Obama was pushed forward to go for the presidency. Almost any Dem could have won the 2008 election; this was truly a chance to create change benefitting the great majority of Americans. We got what looks like "change" instead.
And Corportists got their profitability protection. On the backs of the working and middle classes. There will be considered to have been "reform," but the reality will suck. Those who notice this will be called labeled whiners and misfits.
We are so fucked.
Bah! The fight's just begun.
I, for one, am stripped to the buff and spoiling for a knockdown brawl.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness