Barack Obama may be willing to go to the mat on his healthcare plan, after all. While I remain dubious that his approach will work in the end — I remain committed to a single-payer plan — it is clear that he is offering the best of what is possible.
The question has been whether he would defer to Congress, allowing them to weaken reform — to remove the public option, to eat away at other necessary reforms — or make it clear that there are elements of his plan that are non-negotiable.
Having just listened to the healthcare forum, I find myself a bit more optimistic about reform’s chances. The president repeatedly talked of the need for a public option, of regulation of the insurance industry and a focus on preventative care — pieces that must be included in any non-single-payer reforms.
Basically, he has decided to take his approach to the public so that the public can then take his fight to Congress. Or so it seems.
Here is what The Caucus blog at The New York Times reported shortly before the town hall started:
The White House is working to intensify a grass-roots push for its health care plan. With Congress on recess this week, the event here in Annandale is one of several intended to highlight the president’s urgent call to reduce costs to the health care system and lower the number of uninsured Americans.
“One of the reasons the president is out there today is for people to get a better understanding of what his health plan will do,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, briefing reporters back at the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
He pushed off the suggestion that a single-payer plan would work best by saying that it “works well in some countries” but was “not appropriate in the United States” due to the existing employer-based system. His alternative is a “government-run ‘public option’ to compete with private insurers,” which “would provide ‘competition and choice’ and ‘keep insurers honest.'”
The event, like all of these, featured what I’ll call an “Oprah moment” — the president hugged a cancer patient who had broken down in tears as she asked about her own coverage — designed to humanize the issue and Obama. And there were questions from doctors (about malpractice caps — Obama is against them) and small business owners (about the unaffordability of coverage) and advocates (Health Care for America Now, which is supported by the president).
What was missing were any questions from hardcore critics — whether from the left or the right. But this wasn’t a debate, or intended as a balanced presentation. This was a presidential sales job intended to get the grassroots out and working.
And it was long overdue.
Hank Kalet 
At least Billie Mays had the decency to use his own products. I LOVE the ability of politicians to look you in the eye (or the teleprompter) and LIE with a straight face. Do you think that any politician will be using the same health care as they are shoving on us? By way of example, where does Obama send his kids to be educated while nuking the voucher program for the poor black children of washington district of corruption?No, this is a sales job for government control of health care. Hillary tried it. And, now it's back. While we MAY have some problems with healthcare, … …… I don't believe 43M uninsured and even after their program they are saying they will have 15M uninsured (great program!)… … they could fix the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid first …… they could make some small changes in the tax deductibility of benefits …… they could hold some hearings on why the Massachusetts program is a failure ……. THEY COULD NOT WRITE AN EXCEPTION FOR THEMSELVES IN THE LAW …The problems if any appear to be the fault of past gooferment actions — ww2 wage and price controls — Medicare inserting goooferment in medicine — must treat for free at hospitals — myriad of conflicting federal state and local diktats.Sorry, this is \”fix\” is much worse than the problem.AND, the politicians are lying!AND what's worse, you're getting sucked in to their lies.
Harvard professor Malcolm Sparrow recently testified that roughly $100 billion or more of Medicare and Medicaid dollars go down the drain each year due to fraud. It’s easy to rip these programs off because of their vast size and electronic claims processing. Medicare processes more than 1 billion of claims each year. This Washington Post article last year described one particular example of the fraud. A high-school drop-out managed to bilk Medicare out of $105 million by submitting a 140,000 false claims from her laptop computer.