“Note that the Des Moines Register and a majority of Iowans support a public plan option. So I’m afraid the chances do not look good for even this half measure of reform.”—THAT is exactly what is wrong with our supposedly ‘representative’ government.

It’s good to see a Dem rebutting the disinfo Luntz and his ilk spew BUT “So the next thing we need is for reporters to ask Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel: do these talking points touting a public health insurance plan represent a firm White House commitment to insist on including a public option in the reform bill? Because if they don’t, then what’s the difference between Democrats and Frank Luntz?
—-I’m betting that there isn’t; for me the telling points are Obama just not coming out and saying that the plan MUST include a ‘public option’ (since he won’t listen to the single payer argument); that a Dem Senator or Rep. hasn’t already rebutted what’s coming; AND that even what might be described as the general outline of how a ‘public option’ would work by any Dem.

This is especially so given that politicians nowadays are more salespeople than anything else; really goes to show how much Wyden’s bill has in support compared to a ‘public option’ plan.

The president wants a “public option”. Does he mean a government run plan like Medicaid or Medicare or a Medicaid-Plus which they farm out to private insurers?

What if government merely defined certain minimum plans (with perhaps high deductibles or some other features which ensure service, but limit premium cost) which insurers must offer, so people won’t be priced into bankruptcy?

After all, if government pushes (or requires) people to have insurance then they should certainly have affordable plans to choose from? Given total power we can imagine insurance companies creating gold-plated plans to rob everyone and that certainly isn’t the Obama plan.

what’s the difference between Democrats and Frank Luntz?

the biggest difference is that the democrats control congress and the presidency while luntz doesn’t.

the second biggest difference is that the democrats have promised us good policy and major healthcare reform if only we would work to help them win elections. luntz and the republicans haven’t promised us anything but trouble.

where there is no difference is that neither the dems nor luntz want an honest public conversation about health care reform options – one that seriously advances our understanding of the issues and costs involved. and they both seem hell bent on manipulating public opinion (although in different ways) in order to provide cover for them while they write policy to benefit their corporate donors.

Well said, selise.

Listening to the Republicans and Democrats discuss healthcare is a little like listening to an argument between two guys on a sinking ship as to whether they should put two or four holes in the bottom of the ship to let the water out.

Hop on over to the Orange Satan for your daily action diary exhorting you to call your leaders NOW in favor of the two-hole option.

Dr. Dean, to his credit, has drawn a line in the sand in favor of 1.5 holes.

Given those choices, I’d vote for the two-hole option, hoping that might give me extra time to think of a third choice. Of course, not all holes are equal.

but our job isn’t to vote on bills. our job as citizens is to educate, advocate and organize.

the democrats in deecee don’t define the terms and limits of the debate unless we let them. and if we let them then the only options we will ever discuss will be ones designed by their big corporate donors.

so, here’s my question: when amy goodman says “the media” does that include us?

“I think the way the media works is they show the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington. Often that is very narrow. But the fact is, the majority of Americans fall outside of that opinion.” -Amy Goodman

there’s a ton of evidence that single payer 1) is the most popular option among the citizenry and 2) can provide the most comprehensive coverage at the lowest cost.

single payer may very well be the only policy option that can work.

now is the time to put single payer back on the table.

p.s. if we tie ourselves to a fucked up insurance based policy that public doesn’t like, i don’t think it’s very likely we’re going to be given a second chance to do it right. won’t we be adding ammunition to the argument that we have to have massive entitlement reform because it’s all to expensive and another example of government’s failure?

Every once in a while, you should take me literally, even if I’m being facetious.

I agree single payer should be on the table. I agree it’s better than anything else being considered, though that’s a low hurdle.

That said, I’m worried about the Dems agreeing to some compromise that doesn’t even have a meaningful public plan option. There are versions of the public plan option that could lead, through logical attrition, to a eventual displacement of the current system by single payer or something like it. That is why the industry and Republicans are fighting the inclusion of a public plan in any “reform” bill that moves forward, and why I favor it. I want to preserve the chances of that displacement.

If my choices are single payer versus any of the options under consideration, I vote for single payer; if the choice is something that includes a meaninful public plan and the freedom to choose it (instead of it being limited to a select groups) vs a “reform” bil that doesn’t include this, then I choose the public plan.

sorry, i my snark meter keeps getting busted and it’s the only meter i’ve got. literal vs facetious and i’m hopeless.

my frustration (in general, not with you) is with how successful the deecee dems and friends have been in co-opting and confusing the single payer message. i’m not blind and i see how the progressive blogosphere has for the most part changed direction (from say 2 years ago) and fallen in line with the deecee dem messaging which requires no serious discussion of single payer as a legitimate policy option.

….

That is why the industry and Republicans are fighting the inclusion of a public plan in any “reform” bill that moves forward

i disagree with this statement. judging from recent history, industry always wants more and the republicans will fight against any plan put forward by the dems. imo, it’s a mistake to take their objections as evidence that the proposal is a good one.

my guess is that the fight over the public option is meant to be the shiny object that keeps us from fighting for single payer. the pols in deecee may suck a governance, but they have proven to be very skilled at these kinds of games.

p.s. if there is a version of the public/private plan you think would work, could you please direct me to it? because i can’t find a plan with enough detail to judge for myself (cost, coverage, etc) and the regulation issues i’ve read about make geithern’s bailout plans look straightforward. i’d like to think there is an way it could work, but right now, i just don’t see it.

I don’t know whether there is a “detailed” description of any plan. Hacker wrote a paper on one version explaining the concept. Ezra Klein later referred to the general concept as getting to single payer “by stealth.” So the theory would be (and what the insurance cos say they fear and claim is unfair) is that a public plan would be subsized/favored by govt, so that any “competition” in a system in which consumers could freely choose public vs private would eventually have most consumers choose the public plan and abandon the private plans — because the latter would be more expensive, more discriminatory, less certain, etc. and they might depend on your holding your current job, whereas the public plan would be independent of where (or whether) you worked for an employer that helped pay for a private plan (as 85% of covered people do). That’s the theory.

So the industry claims this would be “unfair competition” and drive them out of business. Advocates might say, “great. When can we start?” But our leaders are still pretending that (1)we want to preserve a private system and (2) working in a bipartisan fashion when the other side is crazy still have some public benefit. So there are efforts to make the public plan option palatable to those who favor the private insurance model.

Thus, we find Schumer trying to address that argument by making the competition “fair,” but he does that by (in my opinion) forcing the public plan to meet exactly the same adverse conditions facing private insurance companies, so that the privates would have a better shot at competiting and surviving. My view, which I expressed in an earlier post, was that this could be a means to so hobble the public option that it removes the reason for having it. If the public option has natural advantages, I want it to use those — that’s why we want it — and if that results in wiping out the privates, so be it.

But again, none of these details are nailed down, and so the various scenarios are at this time speculative, and political judgments must be made with imperfect knowledge.

The only way to salvage a public plan with even a ghost of a chance of setting the stage for a single-payer-style system is to educate and mobilize as many Americans as possible as to the unsustainability of even the “best” possible public option system.

That’s where the public plan advocacy groups, and talk points like Begala’s, do the greatest damage, particularly in conflating the virtues of “choice of plan” with those of “choice of provider.”

People don’t want a panoply of insurance choices; they fucking want coverage! Possibly the most potent example of how “choice of plan” can be a disaster rather than a solution was the Medicare Part D fiasco, where seniors were given a deadline to sign up with a private plan, the distinctions among which were impossible to decipher.

thanks! so far i think the “stealth” is the bait and insurance bailout is the “switch”

i read some of hacker’s paper a while ago — which is when i got freaked out about the requirement for complicated regulations (risk adjustment, etc) to create the “level playing field”. the way i read it was as a recipe for gaming by the insurance companies since i expect that lobbyists would be heavily involved in writing the regulation even with the dems in charge (and i don’t even want to think about what would happen when/if the republicans get their hands on it).

bottom line, i don’t know how a public/private plan can be written so that i (and everyone else) can judge the public plan option — is it any good? are the insurance companies gaming the system? etc…

how can i support a policy if i can’t understand even these basic issues? my answer is, i can’t. (which is why i keep asking people about it, in case i find someone who can explain it to me)

p.s. i should add there are other things that the public option proposal can’t do that single payer can: for example, single payer would be a major boost to supporting manufacturing industry here in the usa.

excellent points! i pay for my own insurance here in MA and the BCBS plans got massively changed for the second year in a row. i’m now going through the options trying to figure out what plan to sign up with – and just looking at BCBS alone (not including any of the other providers) there are 16 plans for me to chose from. it’s a disaster, i want to choose my doctors — not this shit every year. also, prices are going up and coverage is going down.

it’s not sustainable and if we don’t communicate that clearly, we better not be surprised when the republicans claim we (the dems) have created an expensive unworkable government bureaucracy.

btw, i just started reading the beginning of begala’s response and saw this:

The striking thing about Luntz’s memo is how the rhetoric he advocates apes our message.
The Republicans have three goals:

1. Co-opt our messaging;
2. Confuse voters; and
3. Kill health care reform.

here’s my version:

The striking thing about the dem’s talking points is how the rhetoric apes our (single payer) message. The dems have three goals:

1. Co-opt our messaging;
2. Confuse voters; and
3. Kill single payer based health care reform.

single payer advocates have been working (educating, organizing, etc) for years (about twenty i think in the case of pnhp) and now that the public is in favor and it’s clear that’s the best option from the standpoint of good policy / good government — what do the dems do? co-opt the single payer message and then complain when republicans co-opt their co-optation.

as i wrote above, neither the deecee dems nor the republicans appear to want an honest policy discussion.

i guess that means it’s up to us.

OT. digby said:

Al Hunt just told Andrea Mitchell that Obama could have picked a “more formidable intellectual force” for the court but he threaded the political needle very well. When Andrea Mitchell went on to ask if the White House was holding a conference call later to reassure people about her intellectual abilities, Hunt said that she wasn’t as bad as Alberto Gonzales.

Would this be the same Al Hunt, husband of Villager Judy Woodruff, who seems to have
hired Kevin “Dow 36,000″ Hassett as an economics columnist? Fail me up, Scotty.

A minimum. That is the problem. Who in their right mind would want an insurance company analyst to dictate medical policy? That person would not be ignorant, but either corrupt and profiting from the insurance company, or plain stupid.

I love the way we’re being forced to fight for a public option when that’s not even what we want. Is anyone still talking about single-payer? Hilary’s plan is one of the reasons I wanted her to stay in the Senate.

jim White promoted!
Conservatives Deliberately Misread Sotomayor’s Olmos Lecture

late cruisers, epu’ers, like me, appreciate your ‘wind vaning’…
(especially when we are blog-jumping to the next thread and have no idea there is one. lol.)
http://images.google.com/imgre…..G%26um%3D1
thanks.

I have been saying for a long time that the question for those who don’t want a government bureaucrat deciding my healthcare is “Which do you prefer? A government bureaucrat who just wants to do his job, or an insurance flunkey whose bonus, even his continued employment, depends on how many claims he can deny?”

It’s so funny that you brought up those three talk points of Begala’s, because I thought EXACTLY the same thing (about who’s co-opting whose message) when I read them!

Further on in Begala’s memo, he (justifiably) notes Luntz’s chutzpah in advising Rethugs to portray Obama’s health care reform plan as an “insurance industry bailout.” Except from our perspective (if I may speak for you), and contrary to Begala, that’s exactly what it is! Luntz is stealing a talk point from the single-payer side. (Of course, the bailout desired by Rethugs would be orders of magnitude worse.)

Oh, and bless you for attempting to read the Hacker paper. It’s on my long list of things to do, just so I can say I did the next time Jason Rosenbaum drops by.

i didn’t read it all, just the beginning and then i skipped to the end, only to see this in the last paragraph:

Do not let the Republicans Begala and friends kill reform single payer by co-opting our message. When they repeat their talking points, you must punch holes in them.

i fixed it for them. *g*

p.s. pnhp agrees:

Look at another example from Luntz’s report: “We suggest ratcheting up the rhetoric against insurance companies to almost the same degree as you do against Washington bureaucracy. Call the Democratic plan a ‘bailout for the insurance industry’ — both because it is, and because it will build lasting credibility by going after the two things the American people hate most: Washington bureaucracy and insurer greed.”

Wow! Luntz is right! The Democratic plan IS a “bailout for the insurance industry.” In fact, the Democrats have lost all credibility on this one when they have AHIP’s Karen Ignagni front and center at every hearing, every forum, every summit, and her operatives providing input to the closed-door sessions, while they have excluded from the process those who most vigorously attack the insurance companies – the single payer advocates.