WHITE HOUSE MAY CAVE ON PUBLIC OPTION

[BigBearJohn]

WASHINGTON -- It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Monday.

"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable.

His comments came as the Senate Finance Committee pushed for a bipartisan deal. To help pay for the package, the committee planned to announce an agreement Wednesday with hospitals and the White House for $155 billion over a decade in reductions to Medicare and charity-care payments for hospitals, according to a person familiar with the agreement. That will help pay for the legislation, expected to cost at least $1 trillion over 10 years.

One of the most contentious issues is whether to create a public health-insurance plan to compete with private companies.

Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet President Barack Obama's goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.

MORE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124692407982802911.html#mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy

[regnaD kciN]

1. Wall Street Journal article...

:boring:

[BigBearJohn]

3. Yes, but it is quoted on Huffington Post AND Raw Story

otherwise I would not have posted it.

[regnaD kciN]

13. True, but keep in mind that HuffPost...

...has a tendency to go for headline stories of the "Oh noes! Obama is giving in to the conservatives" genre -- whether that interpretation is in line with the facts or not.

[Missy Vixen]

2. So, when's someone going to tell me this is just "chess" again?

It is obvious that there will be NO meaningful reform. Period.

[leftstreet]

6. Be gone, you pawn!

:hi:

[regnaD kciN]

14. It's not "chess"; it's an attempt at tea-leaf-reading from the WSJ...

They are taking an off-hand statement Emmanual made and spinning it the way Rupert Murdoch would want it to be.

This is a little like bringing up Biden's statement from Sunday and concluding that Obama has authorized Israel to attack Iran.

[Sebastian Doyle]

4. Not. Fucking. Acceptable.

no co-ops. no triggers. no bait and switch horseshit. Do it right, or do nothing at all.

And if you do nothing at all, resign from your job so you can be replaced with someone who will.

[lib2DaBone]

5. That didn't take long for the White House to Cave....

Bernie Sanders was on the Big Ed show saying that the insurance companies are spending Millions and flooding Capital Hill with thousands of high pressure Lobbyists.

It doesn't matter what is right or what the American people want...we are going to get what the Corporations allow.

[regnaD kciN]

16. Can we not jump to conclusions at the moment...?

The Senate HELP committee just brought out a proposal with a strong public option; the House has made it clear that a public option is necessity for a bill to pass there. I see no reason to give greater weight to a vague statement from Emmanuel (and interpreted by Murdoch's WSJ) than to those realities. I'm not going to start screaming unless the bill actually comes out of the House-Senate conference committee with the public option stripped.

What I'm more concerned about, FWIW, is an "individual mandate" law, with penalties for those who can't or won't buy in, where even the public option costs far more than middle-class Americans could be expected to pay. The bottom line is affordable healthcare. If it can be achieved without a public option, fine. If it can't be achieved even with a public option, forget it.

[nightrain]

31. the HELP bill does NOT have a strong public option

Please read the bill.

It is open basically to ONLY those who do not have health insurance now (at 1-12.5% of your income cost!!!), or to those whose employer-offered insurance is too great of a percentage of income. There are subsidies available to lower income folks.

There is no PUBLIC there. And it is unaffordable to middle income people.

A good set of critiques are the links at--

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/nightrain

[MidwestTransplant]

7. That's what $1.5MM per week in lobbying fees will buy you.

[TahitiNut]

11. $1 trillion over 10 years... amounts to about $2M per week

That giant sucking sound you hear is the insurance industry vacuuming taxpayer dollars.

[MidwestTransplant]

36. They don't spend that much all the time, just right now bc of the legislation.

[wroberts189]

22. To bad they never watched "Take the money and run."

Soak it all up and then screw them like they have been screwing us.

[and-justice-for-all]

8. Private insurers are never going to be honest and there is NO

way to make them be so.

If people do not want to drop their private insurance, they should not have too; and if some one wants to buy a supplement and also take part in the national health care plan, they should be able too and if some one just wants in on the public option, then so be it. Is it really that fucking hard?

When they take in to consideration the vampires concerns, they are just going to be bleed dry. We have seen what those monsters have done to people and the life they suck out of them, why continue to drag that dead weight along?!

Private insurance is NOT going to dry and and fade away. We will still need insurance on our homes, autos, life, renters and what ever else went want to insure. The burden on companies having to provide health insurance for their employees will be removed, because the majority of people will opt out of their costly insurance and opt in to the national plan. When they do, that cost to the company will a major savings to them.

National Health Care is a benefit to companies and they should be jumping all over it in order to save millions.

WE NEED NATIONAL HEALTH CARE, WE WANT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE!

[TacticalPeek]

9. Sad.

Just fucking sad.

[Pirate Smile]

10. Every other day there is an article and a freak out over the WH not "drawing a line in the sand"

over the public option. They aren't going to do it. They just want the Senate to get something f#$king passed and after the conference, the bill will include a public option. The Centrist Senate Dem group wants to stand in the way. Get it out of the Senate, keep the House's public option in and pass it by 50 plus Biden if necessary.

The just want to keep it moving in the Senate.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x8498053

Does The White House Have a Secret Strategy for Health Reform?

As Paul Krugman writes today, it's a bit tricky to say exactly what the White House's bottom line is on health care -- or even if it has one. "The only thing that's non-negotiable is success," Rahm Emmanuel likes to say. And a lot of things can be defined as success.

Krugman is concerned about the watered-down bill being considered by the Senate FInance Committee, and Obama's unwillingness to draw bright lines on what an acceptable piece of legislation looks like. There is a side of Obama, Krugman says, that "searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak." This may well be right. The problem is that we don't know what Barack Obama is thinking.

Health reform, remember, is a long game. The Senate Finance Committee will not write the health reform bill. They will just write their version of it. Then it will merge with the HELP Committee's version. Then it will be amended on the floor of the Senate. Then it will be merged with the House's health reform bill in a process called "conference committee." Then that bill will return for a final vote.

So here's a question that few have asked, and that virtually no one knows the answer to: How important is conference committee to the way the White House is looking at health care? I've heard it's pretty important. Heard the same thing about Harry Reid, actually. If that's true, then this is what the Democratic leadership is thinking: The overriding imperative right now is to keep health reform alive. That's all that matters. Get it out of the Finance Committee. Get it off the Senate floor. If it's cut down to half a loaf, fine. You don't fix it now. You fix it in conference. Or you let Henry Waxman do it for you.

That, incidentally, is not an unprecedented strategy. It's what the Bush administration did with Medicare Part D. The expansion the Senate wrote was genuinely bipartisan: Ted Kennedy and Tom Daschle both voted for the legislation. But the version that came out of conference committee was significantly more conservative. Kennedy and Daschle abandoned the bill. Democrats began organizing against legislation they had previously supported. It passed anyway.

It passed because it's hard to filibuster bills emerging from conference. You can't change them, for one thing. No amendments are allowed. Nor is there time for debate. You vote for the bill, you vote against the bill, or you filibuster the bill. Those are your options. Democrats are likely to walk out of conference committee with 60 senators in their party. Ben Nelson will not be able to ask to change this bit he doesn't like, and Evan Bayh will not be allowed to offer an amendment weakening that piece. They stand with the White House or against it. And it is, in the estimation of most observers I've talked to, hard to imagine them literally filibustering the final vote on health reform. The White House would torture them until they lost reelection. And if no Democrats are willing to filibuster, then the White House could lose as many as 10 of them and still pass the bill.

At his press conference this week, Obama snapped back at a question from Chuck Todd. “I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle," he said. "I’m not.” He's also not on a partial legislative cycle. He wants to sign a bill in October. That's the goal. The bill the Senate Finance Committee writes in June matters only insofar as it affects the bill Obama gets in October. And there are scenarios in which it's very important for that final bill and scenarios in which it's not very important at all. The problem is we don't know which playbook the White House is working from.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/what_is_the_white_house_thinki.html

[regnaD kciN]

21. Thank you for presenting a clear view...

It's so much more perceptive and mature than the rampant Chicken Littleism around here.

Sometimes, I think we Democrats have been out of power so long that, even when we do get in power, we're still waiting to get the shaft. :eyes:

[bluestateguy]

12. Getting high on the helium of trial balloons again, I see

nt

[wroberts189]

19. Its all those millions of $$ they keep throwing at them. nt

[wroberts189]

15. NO DEAL. nt

[Selatius]

17. It looks like working class folks are going to have to take another hit for the team.

The team where only the rich are truly valued. Hooray for America!

[wroberts189]

20. I have taken too many hits and I am bloody as hell.

My health insurance does not cover it though.

[wroberts189]

18. Keep them honest? Should they not be honest already?

And if they are not..why expect any different?



FULL Medicare with dental and vision for all.

[midnight]

23. Rahm, since getting access to medical treatment for yourself

will most likely not be the same deal as it is for the working class, We want you to be aware that keeping the insurance co. honest is not a consideration of the least concern. Regardless if this corporation will be honest or not is a fact that is not relevant. What is relevant is medical treatment. We don't want a third party dipping into our medical decisions. And all those triggers and mechanisms are fancy and all, but we want straight up access to our world class medical treatment in our great country of America. We don't want to be rationed via nonsense and we don't want to be told that it is not affordable, and we want to stop talking. We want access to health care, and we don't want health insurance.

[black jack brisco]

24. GOPer in disguise.

Obama is a closet repug and so are most so-called Dem's in
Congress. The only way to take our government back from The
Rich and Powerful (aka TRaP) is to vote against every
incumbent in every election, no exceptions, until our
government starts representing The People instead of TRaP.

[tabasco]

28. Pathetic.

Don't you have something better to do?

Bravely fighting the culture war.

[sendero]

29. He's right..

... and you, like most folks here just don't get it. Our gov't is BOUGHT AND SOLD, DEMS and REPS alike.

Any health care plan that comes out of this congress will be like Medicare Part D, mostly a benefit to the companies, not the population. Wake up.

[tabasco]

40. You'r e pathetic, too.

Obama is not a "closet repug," no matter how much you screech.

[sendero]

42. No..

... idiot, that is not what I said. HE IS BOUGHT, JUST LIKE THE REST OF THEM.

One has to look no farther than his "economic plan" and "economic team" to see that.

You wait, there will be NO CHALLENGE to the current health care insurance ripoff in any upcoming legistation. NONE. Just tinkering at the margins to make it look good.

Get a clue.

[Vidar]

25. Emmanuel belongs in jail, not government.

[Freddie Stubbs]

27. This isn't Cuba. We don't throw people in jail just because we disagree with them on policy issues

[Inuca]

30. Really? Why? n/t

[NC_Nurse]

26. Fuck that. If there is no alternative, there is no way to "keep them honest".

Total bullshit.

[emulatorloo]

32. Wall Street Journal = MURDOCH rag. It is like the NY Post/Faux - so dont overexcite yourselves N/T

[Joanne98]

33. They have competition NOW! It's not working because they're EVIL!

[dysfunctional press]

34. MASSIVE and MULTIPLE marches on washington WILL be necessary.

as long as the people don't stand up and shout "NO FUCKING WAY!, they'll think that most of us are happy enough with what they're offering to shove down our throats.

[L0oniX]

35. Yes, let's rob Medicare so our fathers and mothers die sooner. Old people suck anyway.

:sarcasm:

[loudsue]

37. Dems are using "bipartisanship" as code-speak for pandering to corporate benefactors

They know they don't have to listen to the broken side of the aisle. But they also know that they are fully owned subsidiaries of the insurance/banking/oil/pharma/military complex, and they don't want to piss off their masters too terribly much.

Bipartisanship my ass.

[Faryn Balyncd]

38. Emanuel's "sufficient competion": Medicare Rx "benefit" led to MASSIVE increases in drug prices!

And these increases effect ALL Americans (not only Medicare beneficiaries)

http://www.webmd.com/news/20070306/aarp-prescription-drug-prices-up



Since Emanuel thinks the Medicare Rx Drug "benefit" has a "sufficient" stimulation of competitive prices, what can be expected by a health-care "reform" stripped of a public option.

Such a fatally flawed bill will be a massive step BACKWARDS, and needs to be DEFEATED!

[Hippo_Tron]

39. I CAN POST IN ALL CAPS TOO!!!

Freaking out every time somebody from the White House or a Democratic Senator speaks to a reporter is not constructive. This is the period in which people are proposing different ideas. The White House needs to make it appear to the Finance Dems that they are taking their proposals seriously whether they actually are or not. Senators tend to have huge egos and they need to feel like they have the power to make the White House listen to them.

Yes we should absolutely keep the pressure on Congress and the White House to pass a strong public option. But freaking out every time an aide talks to the press is not helpful.

[maryf]

41. The goal is to have universal health care for all...

And to take the PROFIT out of any health care plan...

[JonLP24]

43. This smells like a trial balloon

Enough outrage they probably will not.

Let's all just wait and see what happens.