Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail? [View All]

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/30-9

Published on Thursday, July 30, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?
by Jeff Cohen

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I’m talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a “public option” for healthcare – a government insurance plan citizens could choose to PAY FOR instead of private insurance.

Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that THE demand.

Especially of a President whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the rightwing.

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Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option – to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn’t dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in healthcare.

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