Skip to main content

Was there ever actually going to be a Public Option?

I'm starting to wonder.

With key Democrats like Max Baucus and Nancy Pelosi taking massive contributions from the health insurance lobbyists; with President Obama likewise accepting such contributions and cutting a sweetheart deal with the pharmaceutical companies, it looks more and more like the original plan may have been to feint left, then cut back to the right the whole time.

Look what corporate America has so far achieved:

Big Pharma, for a bribe of only $150 million, has been indemnified against losses in excess of $80 billion over the next decade.

Big Insurance, in exchange for having to actually treat some of its current customers, is seeing the purchase of its product made mandatory by the government, leading to the addition of tens of millions of new customers and rules that allow it to spread risk and cost across greater [possibly even inter-state] populations.

Big Law has managed to keep tort reform completely off the table, despite President Obama's carefully parsed non-promise in his speech last week.

Medicare is set to take tens of billions in cuts that rival what the GOP-controlled Congress wanted to do in the 1990s.

And nobody who currently lacks health insurance will benefit from any of these changes until 2014, even though the taxes to pay for them kick in within the next two years.

When I look at the particulars of the money at the larger scales, one fact emerges:

President Obama had far more interest in having a bill to sign in order to protect his own political future than he ever did in risking serious capital to champion the agenda that his followers desired.

That's primarily because David Axelrod knows that it was independents, not Democrats, who elected him President.

I could turn out to be wrong, but it's looking more and more to be the case.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...