bartleby the scrivener | Obama has written an op ed for The New York Times setting forth the reasons why we need health care reform, none of which will surprise anyone who supports health care reform.
There are four main ways the reform we’re proposing will provide more stability and security to every American.
First, if you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage for yourself and your family — coverage that will stay with you whether you move, change your job or lose your job.
Third, by making Medicare more efficient, we’ll be able to ensure that more tax dollars go directly to caring for seniors instead of enriching insurance companies. This will not only help provide today’s seniors with the benefits they’ve been promised; it will also ensure the long-term health of Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors. And our reforms will also reduce the amount our seniors pay for their prescription drugs.
All worthy goals, and by now familiar ones. When you read the data, it's impossible to understand why there even is a debate, except among politicians whose funding is paid by insurance companies.
Steve Benen comments on the piece:
That last line -- "No one in America should go broke because they get sick" -- is a keeper. We heard it yesterday, and I suspect we'll be hearing it quite a bit more.
In fact, it also seems that the White House message is getting tighter and more focused as the debate progresses. Ideally, it would have started out this way, and it's possible that for some Americans, the rhetorical shift is too late. But for those who are on the fence or hoping to make up their minds as the summer ends and congressional action heats up, the president and his team have a stronger pitch now than they did a couple of months ago. (emphasis added)
Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) says that the public option is dead in the water.
"The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," Conrad said on "FOX News Sunday."
Conrad has proposed creating non-profit health insurance cooperatives that could negotiate coverage as a collective for their members.
He said Sunday that such cooperatives would provide the competition sought by Obama and Democratic leaders to force private insurers to hold down costs and improve practices. (CNN)
Steve Benen points out that Conrad is wrong about the ability of the Senate to pass such a bill.
Bill Kavanaugh discussed yesterday why we need a public option, despite the fools who haven't stopped to ask themselves who runs -- for example -- the schools and a host of other services they take for granted. But Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius seems to think that the public option is not essential to reform.
The White House indicated it could jettison the contentious public option and settle on insurance cooperatives as an acceptable alternative, a move embraced by some Republicans lawmakers who have strongly opposed the administration's approach so far.
Officials from both political parties reached across the aisle in an effort to find compromises on proposals they left behind when they returned to their districts for an August recess. Obama has been pressing for the government to run a health insurance organization to help cover the nation's almost 50 million uninsured.
Sebelius said the White House would be open to co-ops instead of a government-run public option, a sign Democrats want a compromise so they can declare a victory on the must-win showdown.
"I think there will be a competitor to private insurers," she said. "That's really the essential part, is you don't turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition." (Huffington Post)
In his op ed, Obama certainly does not appear to be insisting on a public option -- only that "something must be done."
I am confident that when all is said and done, we can forge the consensus we need to achieve this goal. We are already closer to achieving health-insurance reform than we have ever been. We have the American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association on board, because our nation’s nurses and doctors know firsthand how badly we need reform. We have broad agreement in Congress on about 80 percent of what we’re trying to do. And we have an agreement from the drug companies to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors. The AARP supports this policy, and agrees with us that reform must happen this year.
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