Thanks for the link; can’t bear to listen. Too early in the morning for such masochism.

Obama’s response is the same boilerplate he repeats everywhere, pretty much word for word (eg, click the first link in the first comment to this).

At these “town-hall-style” events, questioners knowledgeable enough to preempt the boilerplate and really hold Obama’s feet to the fire on single payer aren’t allowed within 100 feet of a functioning microphone.

Well, Obama sure has his talking points down, I gotta give him that.
You’re right, Obama just gave single payer the shaft right in front of one of his groupies and the guy just beamed about even being allowed to ask the damned question.

Yes, the “uniquely American system” of screw the people any way you can for the entrenched interests. I just can’t/don’t expect much from this guy. I think the “change” was all about about having a president who could talk circles around everybody, unlike Bush. That’s the only change I see here…someone who can use the English language.
Meanwhile, lookee what’s happening around the country as a result of the housing bubble; (that baaaaad boy):

Tax Bill Appeals Take Rising Toll on Governments
Come ON! What did they THINK was gonna happen? But Goldman Sachs is A-OK; that’s what matters in America and to the Obama admin.

Pushing one-sided, weak-kneed, heavily compromised bills through Congress on the excuse that “this is all we can do just yet” and purposely running rough-shod over your liberal support base (because you assume they ‘have nowhere else to go’ and that they will always fall in line when you tell them, at next election time, ‘oh that Republican is so scary’) is EXACTLY THE PATTERN that we seen and objected to in three decades of Democratic politics.

This is not change we can believe in. To get to the change we can believe in, you need to be telling that to every elected Democrat at every level, and sending letters to the Democratic National Committee at 430 South Capitol St. SE, Washington DC 20003. Tell them just how sick and tired you are of this excuse for a meaningful political party, and how you will refuse to support any more. And then follow through and DON’T support it any more. Questioner Steve at this event, with his “Barack can fool me any way he wants to” attitude, is just as bad as a Palin/Limbaugh Republican for those of us who actually hope good things for our nation’s future.

Shorter Obama:

“2 + 2 = 4 is something they have in France and Germany. But I prefer a more uniquely American solution.”

Obama’s answer makes no sense. Big surprise I know. He doesn’t challenge that single payer would save hundreds of billions. He just says that a big change like that would be hugely disruptive. But if it saves that much, how is it “disruptive”? Isn’t the current system that in comparison wastes those hundreds of billions that single payer would save vastly more “disruptive”? And of course if you look at maintaining the private system with its spiraling costs, between what single payer would save and what these private plans would cost, the difference between the two is more like a trillion dollars. So the basic question comes down to this: Is having an “American” stamp on healthcare worth a trillion dollars to you?

Also, Obama left out the important part of Steve White’s question, which was that single payer dealt with the problem of scarce health care resources going to Big Insurers’ profits, overhead, denial of care bureaucracy, and huge exec compensation packages. He tries to ignore any of the reasoning behind people wanting single payer. Dasn’t let any of that information be repeated

And, yes, BO does have it down pat as to why his is the CAN’T DO administration.

Things are established! Things have been done one way for a long time! Can’t disrupt things which are in place!

Try to imagine Obama as one of the Founding Fathers–what he would say at the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Heh. This is an established situation–dasn’t make waves. Independence? Why? Surely we can get some of the profits into our own hands without that mess?

Yes, we can’t!

One of many things I don’t understand is why business isn’t responding to all of this with … get me out of the business of insuring employees now! Why would business want to keep the current system.. it drains so much time and energy away from what most business are designed to do. As a former small business owner, just shoping for insurance prices and skimming the top of what each scammer claimed they covered was exhausting!

But for now it seems to be a very successful part of a divide and conquer strategy… for everyone from Obama to the folks who admit they are republicans.

Change: (-noun) a transformation or modification; alteration

CHANGE™: (-bs) change

As Digby and Jonathan Cohn of the Boston Globe have pointed out, we can achieve massive improvements in health care and the way we insure for it, even if we must compromise on single payer. Nor do we need full blown government ownership of the health care system, as the English opted to do sixty years ago.

Cohn points to the Dutch and French models. Though each has made distinct choices, both retain private insurers. But they are highly regulated private insurers, whose job is to administer payments, not be the sole, hugely profitable bottleneck deciding who merits health care and who doesn’t.

Those insurers cannot, for example, cancel coverage because the insured uses it and cannot refuse to cover “pre-existing” conditions. Those who most need health care aren’t automatically deemed unqualified to buy health insurance, which is what our system now profitably rewards. They also limit the amounts that private insurers can charge. Mr. Cohn doesn’t mention it, but I suspect the bosses of those insurers make more earth-bound compensation than the predators that run our private insurers.

Everyone has to be covered, with subsidies for the poor and the chronically or severely ill. That’s based, in part, on the belief that those are predicaments we might all face some day, even former top executives at now defunct auto and banking companies, and in part on the belief that having healthier individuals is healthier, safer and more productive for everyone.

Most importantly, the Dutch and French schemes evenly distribute the cost of health insurance and health care predictably across society. That’s a gap we haven’t begun to fill, because it’s an expression that we are all bound together and each of us is as important as the other, no more, no less.

The GOP’s fundamentalists have an elitist view of who is worthy to be saved. Its corporate supporters have an elitist perspective on who merits enormously outsized compensation. Those views diametrically oppose the ones underlying the French and Dutch social systems.

That’s an aspect of the debate that we should put on the table. As the bank bail-out should have made clear, our corporate elites abuse the American myth of self-reliance to keep their employees poorly paid and protected, and to hide their attempts to be the only puppies suckling on the government dog’s teats.

“Uniquely American” = you stupid schmucks bending over and taking it up the bum when any other citizen in any other country would be shutting down said country to get our human rights.

I thought France was straight single-payer (with private insurers permitted to sell supplemental coverage only) and it was Germany with the multiple, highly regulated nonprofit insurers. I could be wrong (watching Frontline’s “Sick Around the World” is still on my to-do list).

Either way, you’re right, which is why I sometimes prefer “profit-purged” to “single-payer.” However, eliminating the core obscenity of our system — insurers’ fiduciary responsibility, and power, to deny care whenever possible — will necessarily require decimating the health insurance sector (although downsized and emasculated remnants may adapt and survive). Anything less falls short of true reform.

The question is not whether Obamacare, even with a “robust” public option, will fail but rather, once it does, its components can be effectively repurposed and expanded in a true profit-purged system.

“2 + 2 = 4 is something they have in France and Germany. But I prefer a more uniquely American solution.”

I’m bookmarking that comment, so I can steal that line.

disgusting… “With Obama, the American people can hope again.”

I guess that’s all we get to do is hope… I want to actualize something… like healthcare for everyone and “disrupting” the fucking big pharma and insurance cos’ mega-profits.

I feel like we’ve been duped by the biggest Republican plant in history w/Obama… like he’s ome huge Rethug trojan horse that’s been inflicted on us.

Disrupt this.

According to the Boston Globe’s Jonathan Cohn:

The Dutch and the French organize their healthcare differently. In the Netherlands, people buy health insurance from competing private carriers; in France, people get basic insurance from nonprofit sickness funds that effectively operate as extensions of the state, then have the option to purchase supplemental insurance on their own. (It’s as if everybody is enrolled in Medicare.) But in both countries virtually all people have insurance that covers virtually all legitimate medical services. In both countries, the government is heavily involved in regulating prices and setting national budgets. And, in both countries, people pay for health insurance through a combination of private payments and what are, by American standards, substantial taxes.

When the system allows a mixed race child raised by his mom and grandmother to earn scholarships to Columbia and Harvard, then to the state and federal legislatures, and ultimately the presidency, changing the system is not something a lottery winner like Obama will promote or permit.

I only hope we learn something different from his broken promises than we did from Mr. Bush’s.

The Dutch and French systems have healthy profitable private insurers, but they are not remotely as powerful or profitable – and their executives not remotely as highly-paid – as ours.

I agree that credible reform of health insurance would substantially reduce the profits and unique market power of today’s American health insurers. Obama doesn’t want to be responsible for that. So he’s pretending we can do both, keep health insurers as profitable as they are now, while achieving credible reform.

Mr. Obama can’t use Solomon’s simple ruse of splitting the health care baby, knowing its true mother will stop him, thus revealing the false one. He has a diffuse public and an organized, highly profitable and generous insurance industry.

Obama won’t try to split the baby. He will mediate, as if he had no stake in the game. Then he will convince the real mother – the public desperately in need of better and lower cost health care – that she should cede her baby to the false one so that He can rule in peace.

Erm, change is supposed to be disruptive, no?

Obama’s approach has been less Solomonic than Solomanic-depressive.

Here’s the problem:

While single-payer is wonderful, there are too many entities — well-heeled entities — arrayed against it. The public option could be passed, and would be infinitely better than what we have now, but too many people would rather see nothing done at all if they can’t get single-payer — which means we will have nothing at all, ever. Period.

It’s, unfortunately, recognizing reality. The single-payer advocates won’t call their congresscritters to whip for it, and they turn their noses up at the public option, so nothing will ever get done and we will starve because we can’t afford health care.

this is one-sixth of our economy, and we’re not suddenly just going to completely upend the system.

But presumably that one-sixth includes health care providers and so on, why would you need to “upend” it all? How much of that one sixth are the private health insurance companies?

PW, that’s one whopping, blunderbuss generalization about what “the” single-payer advocates are or aren’t doing regarding public option lobbying.

In my experience, most strong single-payer advocates are pushing, and yes, lobbying, for the best possible public option, but with grave misgivings. My view is that it is strategically wise to vocally enumerate the systemic inadequacies and injustices inherent in the public option concept, even while pragmatically working toward getting the best, most Medicare-like version enacted.

There’s nothing contradictory about simultaneously advocating for HR 676. That drives discussion and education in a good direction. The major single-payer groups have not taken a public stand on whether they will urge legislators to vote down the bill that finally emerges. If they do ultimately oppose it, that choice will have arisen from an honorable judgment that it’s pragmatically wiser to forgo a Rube Goldberg non-solution in favor of mobilizing and channeling the documented majority support for national health insurance into a stronger political movement.

As for your blanket statement, in the comment to Hugh, that “the” public option would be “infinitely better than what we have now,” you have no evidence for that, in the first instance, because we have no idea what “the” sausage is going to look like. Moreover, the notion that competitive pressure even from a “robust” public option — much less the far more likely milquetoast compromise — will for the first time in history make the private insurers “honest” to a degree that will significantly improve Americans’ lives remains theoretical.

I would counsel caution before impugning the wisdom, ethics, or political acumen of those choosing not to endorse the crapshoot or, as in my case, push for its enactment more in sorrow than assent.

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We’re not going to get any of what we need out of these corporate puppets. This is a good thing, something to organize around and motivate people with. It makes the real issue very plain and obvious: Get corporate money out of politics, and take back our government. Now.

Blue Dogs & Repukes out in 2010. Obama too, if he stops universal single-payer national healthcare.
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The single-payer advocates won’t call their congresscritters to whip for it,

oh, well then… guess i need to stop calling my congresscritters to talk about hr 676 and ask them to sponsor it/vote for it, since i’m apparently the only one doing so.