The AP recently released poll results on how people feel about the health care reform bill. Commenting on it, Kevin Drum says:

Kip Sullivan is essential reading for those who wish not to forget that the public option movement has been a case study in skilled cooptation of well-intentioned progressive groups and impulses. This post highlights his latest contribution.

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.

Absent a substantial change in direction by Congressional Leadership and the President, I think it’s time to do whatever progressives can to kill the health care reform legislation currently moving through Congress, and then to immediately reset to Medicare for All, single payer.
As HR 3962 bill sits now, it’s worse than no bill at all, and the Senate and Conference versions are likely to make a final bill still worse. If so, that bill will destroy progressive and Democrat credibility by associating us once again with reforms that don’t solve problems, and corporate interests, in opposition to the American people.

Polling organizations such as WaPo/ABC have accepted a misleading frame for the public option story by focusing mainly on asking the public what its opinion is of an idea very similar to the original PO. It has not asked everyone in any of its samples about restricted eligibility PO plans, or about State-run plans. It has not asked anyone about single-payer, Medicare for All since June, playing into the Administration’s view that it should be taken off the table even though millions of people favor it, even though there are two current single-payer bills in Congress, and even though it would have required only an extra question in any of these surveys to ask about. What a miserable failure in serving the public this record of polling is. What accounts for it? Are the people at these polling organizations so politically biased that they deliberately slanted their supposedly scientific activities to create a frame that would be favorable to Administration proclivities? Or are they simply so immersed in the Washington insider world that they are no longer competent to create reasonably objective polling efforts that represent shades of opinion across the political spectrum on health insurance reform. I’m sure the answer is more like a combination of both bias and incompetence. But based on WaPo’s errors in adding general PO to support to restricted eligibility PO support in its surveys, I’m starting to incline a bit toward the incompetence explanation.

The story that hasn’t been told enough is that the rising cost of private insurance is hurting corporate America. It’s been a terrible strategic mistake. Progressives could have a powerful ally in the fight against Big Insurance/PhRMA: Corporate America itself.

Consider that even Wal-Mart, which spends far less than its peers just to offer it’s employees a junk insurance package, spent an average of $3,500 a year per employee on health insurance in 2002. The way to beat UnitedHealth Care and Blue Blue Cross is by offering Wal-Mart a public plan that is cheaper, yet offers better benefits: Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It.

Allowing any person, business or local/state agency to buy into Medicare is not single-payer, because it allows private insurance to continue to operate. But unlike the other falsely-advertised “robust public options,” Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It will actually lead to a public plan that covers at least 164 million Americans and will control cost. It makes real the false rhetoric for the public option.

Well, maybe not “over” as in “there will be no legislation passed in this session that contains the phrase “public option.” Perhaps there will still be legislation that has a provision with that label. But it will bear no resemblance to Jacob Hacker’s original design for a public option plan, and it won’t provide a public option that can provide any real competition for private insurance companies.