With every passing day, Barack Obama is making it clear that he is willing to sell out his left flank.
The latest is this, from The New York Times:
The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.
The “public option,” a new government insurance program akin to Medicare, has been a central component of Mr. Obama’s agenda for overhauling the health care system, but it has also emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition. Kathleen
Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said the public option was “not the essential element” for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.Mr. Obama himself sought to play down the significance of the public option at a town-hall-style meeting on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo., when a university student challenged him on how private insurers could compete with the government.
After strongly defending the public plan, the president suggested that he, too, viewed it as only a small piece of a broader initiative intended to control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient.
“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” the president said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
Keep in mind that the public option was a rather weak alternative to real reform (single-payer), but that it was a mechanism that could expand coverage and keep the insurance companies that have been running our healthcare system honest.
The reality is that he lost his healthcare bet before he started — by allowing the muzzling of single-payer advocates and throwing his lot in with the conservative Blue Dogs in his own party. The Blue Dogs have never been serious about reform, and the more they control the process the more likely it is that we will get something the politicians will call reform but that patients and taxpayers will not.
Hank Kalet 
When the hell are the Democrats going to get a spine, they have the presidency and the Congress and they are so worried about what the GOP and conservative Demopublicans think? Geezus! Maybe the more liberal and progressive Democrats will kick Obama into the right direction? All this bogus crap about co-ops, tort reform and buying insurance across state lines is brought up to distract, confuse and misdirect. We need, at the least, a strong public option but single payer or Medicare for all would be best.All the right wingers and corporate shills say that universal health care in the other industrialized democracies is a failure. Bull shale. Just look at the polls (below), they love their systems and would not trade it for our crap mess. A recent Harris/Decima Poll in Canada, the country that probably knows our system the best, found a 10-to-1 majority who believe their system is better than ours. And Harris Polls in France and Britain found that most people there believe that their systems are “the envy of the world.”A 2008 CTV-Globe and Mail poll found that 91% of Canadians like their health care system very much and would not want to exchange it for our patch-work quilt disaster.
Expecting courage from a politician is like expecting a golden egg from a goose. The D's and the R's are venial corrupt people. On \”health care\”, \”health care insurance\”, or whatever they want to call it today, it's about the three imperatives: reward your friends, punish enemies, and feather your own nest. That's why they have exempted themselves, cut deals with the players cutting out the people, and gotten back door contributions galore. Trial lawyers keep tort reform out. SEIU gets new power. We just need to stop the gooferment's intrusions into everyone's life!