Are we going to pass a health care bill this year? Will it have a public option?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’ve got one word for you:
ConservaDems.
Let’s face it BooMan, if Obama gets this passed, the Republicans are goners. Once Franken is seated, as you’ve pointed out, the Republicans become irrelevant. The ConservaCems no longer have any political cover.
And they will fold, just like they have for the last five years.
Yes, but who will they fold to? Obama or the Insurance companies?
exactly.
Would be nice if they gave into Obama.
I’m not betting on it.
Here’s my fear: A bill passes with a “public option,” it’s a mandatory HMO kinda thing and in order to pay for it we have to give up, I dunno, meat? our internet connection?
My fear is that it passes with a weak-ass public option that won’t kick in until I’m old enough for Medicare and Obama is long out of office.
There will be a health care bill when the bodies begin to pile up. Until that time–not too far away, I’m afraid–It will be “too expensive”; it will be “socialism”; it will be “government interference in the market”…ad infinitum et absurdum
Yep!
There reason 70%+- of the public supports a serious reform of health care is because more and more are experiencing the present state of health care in this country. In other words, they (or someone they know) have been burned.
Soon it will be 90%. Obama almost certainly knows this. He needs to get something started, a foot in the door that can be built on when the truth becomes so apparent that even big business has to sign on (non-medical big business).
Once that happens being ‘pro business’ will mean you are taking bribes FOR health reform, instead of taking bribes being against.
nalbar
But that’s my exact concern, that all that will come to pass is what you say: “He needs to get something started, a foot in the door that can be built on . . .”
The time is long since past for some half-hearted measure that kicks the can down the road for another ten years.
I’m pretty optimistic that the plan will look like the current HELP bill (plus the medicare expansion to be added).
Everything sort of seems to be falling into place right now.
I am a little more optimistic than I was a month or two ago, and cautiously agree with you.
yes and yes
Looks like the answer is yes and no respectively.
Rahmbo just sold the public option up the river.
Ding ding ding! Trigger option! You’ll have a public health care option. The conditions to see it activated will be crafted to assure it never, ever happens.
Dems can say they put in a public option. Republicans and ConservaDems can say they put in smart measures to “force the insurance companies to improve without costing the American taxpayer a dime”. The insurance companies make reformy noises and keep right on profiting off of the sick.
The American people get nothing. There’s your answer, Boo.
Yes, a dreary, depressing forecast, and history would say you’re right—-on many more things than just healthcare policy (hey, whatever happened to the antiwar dems?)
If the dems screw us over–again, and for the umpteenth time–where do we go in 2010 or 2012?
well, you’re the oner who said Obama’s gonna get his upper down vote for health care just a few months ago.
care to revisit that prediction?
and by the way the answer is either no and no, or yes and no.
that public option is a gon er i’m afraid, because the democrats are liars with no principles.
they’ve sold us out worse than the GOP sold out the conservatives: at least they got their stacked court and tax cuts.
Yes, they will “pass” healthcare “reform.” Only so Obama can wave his sheet of paper like his psychic mentor Neville Chamberlain (appeaser extraordinaire) did when he got off that plane. Obama always, without question, has to bow down and be obsequious to those in the Republican right so that he can show how “tough” he is on “the left” to his likeminded right-wing cohorts.
Will it have a public option? It will have one of those trigger things that will benefit no one but Obama’s largest corporate contributors. He will, again, try to please everyone. But will, again, please no one but his own monomaniacal ego.
I’m 60 years old now. Nothing I’ve seen leads me to believe we’ll see meaningful, effective, responsible health care reform in this country in my lifetime.
There’s more lip service now being paid to the idea that such reform is necessary, but in the end most of the lip service is only that, and actual votes for real reform won’t follow.
no. AND THEREFORE, no need to bother with the second question.