An unhealthy compromise

It is time for President Barack Obama to make a stand.

His speech earlier this week clearly outlined the need for a public plan as part of healthcare reform, but if he doesn’t step up and play hardball with Congress his words will come back to haunt him.

The latest on healthcare reform is that the man originally tapped to lead the president’s reform effort, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, wants the public plan scrapped in an effort to move legislation forward:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said on Wednesday that the Obama White House would likely have to scrap a public option for health insurance coverage
if it wanted to get the votes needed to pass systematic change.

“We’ve come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue,” the Senator and one-time HHS Secretary nominee said, according to ABC News.

The remarks came after Dashcle, along with former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Howard Baker introduced his own proposal for health care reform that. That plan actually included a pseudo-version of a government-run option. The Daschle proposal calls for (among other things) public insurance pools to be administered by state government, not the feds.

In coming out against a public plan, Daschle adds kindling to an already roaring debate on health care reform. On Thursday morning, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean repeated the mantra that you cannot have effective legislation if it does not include a public option. At the White House on Wednesday, several state legislators who had met with current HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued the same point.

Certainly, the public seems to be weighed in Dean’s favor. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted on Wednesday night showed that 76 percent of respondents wanted a choice between a public option for insurance coverage and private providers.

The public, of course, understands this issue far better than the politicians, most of whom are beholden to the quartet of special interests who control this debate — the insurance industry, drug companies, doctors and hospitals. While I’d like to believe that at least some of them — doctors and hospitals, in particular — have patients’ and consumer’s best interests at heart, the reality is that a public plan could cut deeply into their profits. And that’s what this is all about.

The reality is that a single-payer plan would be the most efficient and effective way to fix health care in the United States, but a host of myths and political considerations stand in the way. In the meantime, Ezra Klein offers some interesting thoughts on the next steps toward reform and some stronger alternatives than the perpetually cautious men on Capitol Hill seem ready to embrace.

Those options, for the most part, have been excluded from the debate, as he notes. The public plan, however, remains on the table, though it is under seige. People like Gov. Dean, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are making it clear that, without it, any reform legislation would be a sham.

Time to step up Mr. President and spend some of that political capital you’ve been storing.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet