The CPC has a history of promising to take a stand on progressive issues only to cave at the critical moment.

When contemplating American politics today, it’s hard not to think of Yeats’s line from the Second Coming:

”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the health care reform legislative process, the progressives held true to the slogan that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they forgot the maxim that “if you stand for nothing, you’ll end up with nothing.” So, here we are with worse than nothing, with two immoral bills, that do more harm than good, and with every prospect that an equally bad compromise between them will be presented to both Houses for final ratification.

That immoral compromise needs to be defeated. Health Care Reform must be sent back to the Leadership for further work. If Congress is not immediately ready for true health care reform ending the fatalities, bankruptcies and foreclosures within a years’ implementation time, then, at least, a bill must be passed that ends rescissions, denials of coverage or price discrimination based on preconditions, and that limits insurance premium increases to the annual rate of inflation, effective immediately.

For the past few days, I’ve been trying, by e-mail, to get the participants in the Northern Virginia Move-on Council to take my advice about the best way to get a good, strong, public option. Namely, to abandon the public option advocacy in favor of all-out support for “Medicare for All,” and specifically for HR 676, John Conyers’ bill. My efforts at this have been quite unsuccessful.

Today, I went to a face-to-face meeting called by the Council to plan activities for the rest of this month to provide explicit support for a “strong public option.” At the meeting I questioned the continuing strategy of Move-on calling for support for a strong public option. In one way or another, I made most of the points I made here.

Statement released this morning from the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee

A quick renunciation and self-flagellation.

By agreeing to speak no ill of the public option concept, the Congressional Progressive Caucus and likeminded others (categorized here as “public option pragmatists”) help ensure that the only critiques most Americans hear of this flawed idea come from corporatists and lunatics. In the process they facilitate the further marginalization of the solution they, and most Americans, support: profit-purged (aka single-payer) health care financing.