Healthy Choice

This is the moment. America has a chance to reform its broken health care system, the one that drives ordinary people to bankruptcy while capitating doctors and enriching health care moguls beyond all sense of decency. The one run for profit, as if that would be the best way to run the fire department or the police department. While a single payer model might be the one most desired by progressives, it's unlikely to happen here, and instead the battle line is being drawn at a real public option, one that the health care companies fear more than anything...because it would not be run for profit:

Because Democratic Leaders (such as they are) too often tend to be idiots when it comes to developing narratives and memes (we're talking "marketing" here), they too often overlook or don't understand GOP "gifts" when they're given. Case in point: on May 17 Mitch McConnell admitted to Chris Wallace on the May 17 FNSunday:

"The private insurance people would not be able to compete with a government option."

It's funny, but I thought in America competition was supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient. So if that would put the hateful, coverage-denying private insurance companies out of business or, more likely, force them to actually compete without de facto collusion, why would that be a bad thing for average Americans?

Per Ezra Klein in the Washington Post, the public option is the exact opposite of what the insurance industry-fed Republican party characterizes it as. It provides choice:

The private insurance market is a mess. It's supposed to cover the sick and instead competes to insure the well. It employs platoons of adjusters whose sole job is to get out of paying for needed health care services that members thought were covered.

Moreover, public insurance is simply more efficient. Medicare holds costs down better than private health insurance. The substantially public systems employed by every other industrialized nation cost less and cover more than the American model. So the question became how to marry the policy need for public insurance with the political need to preserve the status quo.

Enter the public insurance option. It doesn't replace the insurance individuals already rely on. But it provides an alternative. It lets them make the decision.

Powerful health insurance industry interests are working hard to stop this. Kaiser News, for instance, covers the Republican letter to Obama decrying a public plan and threatening that it would not be "bipartisan" should it pass. Which seems like a smaller problem every day as their party shrinks to it's angry, entrenched 25% core. As in regional party. (So maybe the public plan can exclude the South?)

The bigger problem are conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats folding due to their own campaign contributions from health insurance companies:

The Blue Dog Coalition issued a statement that said it would only support the public health care option as a fallback measure that would be triggered sometime down the road if private insurers don't meet a particular set of goals.

The backsliding took advocates of reform by surprise because 20 members of the coalition had previously signed a pledge expressing their support for a public option without a trigger. The statement was written and organized by the reform coalition Health Care for America Now (HCAN), which strongly opposes a trigger and sees it as an industry plot to strangle a public option in the crib.

The only answer is for Obama to do what Bill Clinton did not back in 1993: put himself into the mix, whereas Clinton left it all for his unelected wife, Hillary. She became the meme -- "Hillarycare" -- and Bill never stuck his neck out. As for Obama, Robert Reich asks:

Without strong White House leadership, individual members of Congress are particularly susceptible to the threats and promises of powerful lobbies. A statement of White House goals that leaves the details to Congress will likely result in legislation that superficially meets those goals but whose details undermine them. That's the biggest danger now with the inchoate healthcare legislation.

Fortunately, the White House now intends to get more involved in the emerging healthcare bill. Following are the three biggest issues where powerful lobbies on the other side are working the details to their advantage. The question is how hard the Obama White House will push back.

There seems to be one other individual who can potentially carry the public option over the goal line, but he's an injured player:

“He is the only guy who can bring us together, temper the demands of liberal advocacy groups and steer people toward a pragmatic solution,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who is a member of both the health committee and the Finance Committee and is a longtime collaborator with Mr. Kennedy on health legislation.

If he can get his old friend from the other side of the aisle, Orrin Hatch, to come aboard and carry with him enough votes to take America out of the health insurance dark ages, then Senator Edward Kennedy would go out with the biggest success of his storied Senate career.

The stakes could not be higher.