Jacob Hacker (Creator Of Public Option) - "Why I Still Believe in This Bill"

[TomCADem]

A fairly balanced critique of the bill by none other than the developer of public option idea. He notes the weaknesses of the bill, but also discusses why he believes it should be passed:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-i-still-believe-bill

The public option was always a means to an end: real competition for insurers, an alternative for consumers to existing private plans that does not deny needed care or shift risks onto the vulnerable, the ability to provide affordable coverage over time. I thought it was the best means within our political grasp. It lay just beyond that grasp. Yet its demise--in this round--does not diminish the immediate necessity of those larger aims. And even without the public option, the bill that Congress passes and the President signs could move us substantially toward those goals.

As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms. First, it creates a new framework, the “exchange,” through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health insurance that workers in large companies take for granted. Second, it makes available hundreds of billions in federal help to allow people to buy coverage through the exchanges and through an expanded Medicaid program. Third, it places new regulations on private insurers that, if properly enforced, will reduce insurers’ ability to discriminate against the sick and to undermine the health security of Americans.

These are signal achievements, and they all would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago.

To be sure, the bill also contains a requirement on individuals to have coverage, which has become the main target of criticism from the left. Without the public option, this mandate amounts to forcing people to buy private insurance without creating an affordable public alternative with which insurers must compete.

But the correct response to this critique is to make the requirement less necessary by providing greater assistance with the cost of premiums and by facilitating enrollment in the exchange--in other words, by making coverage more attractive and easier to obtain.

The lack of a public option also makes even more imperative tough requirements on insurers to make them live up to their stated commitment to change their business model and slow the spiraling cost of coverage. The most important way to do this is to move away from the Senate bill’s state exchanges and toward a national exchange such as that contained in the House bill. The federal government needs to be directly involved in implementing and enforcing strong national regulations of insurers and creating the new exchange. Otherwise, the effort for reform might fail at the hands of hostile governors.

[Oregone]

1. I'm just a nameless piece of shit, and I think this bill sucks

Strange days when a steaming pile of shit has more principles and common sense than this crew shilling for the bill

[pnwmom]

3. "a steaming pile of shit has more principles and common sense"

So says the self-identified steaming pile of shit.

:shrug:

[Oregone]

5. At least I'm honest. No delusions of grandeur here

[jonnyblitz]

2. the New Republic, the DLCer's magazine of choice.

:puke:

[BP2]

4. Another Progressive towing the party line instead of

the party needs.

Health Insurance stocks just hit a 52-week high! Now why is that??!

I swear it seems some Progressives are damned determined to see Barack's HCR dream fail.

[TomCADem]

6. Its A Mirror Image Of The Tea Partiers, If They Disagree With You, They Must Be Lying

Some folks seem to find it absolutely unfathonable that reasonable people might disagree with them. On the tea party side, if you are trying to support HCR, then you must be some scum sucking communist. On the alleged "left" side, if you support HCR, then you are a scum sucking corporatist. Of course, attacking the character and motives of people who disagree with you, is something that we attack Fox News for doing, yet practice without the slightest bit of shame for the hypocrisy of it all. It may come as a surprise, but many reasonable, patriotic, and well informed people may actually think that the passage of the HCR bill is a positive step.

[Mimosa]

7. I finally learned never to believe what a politician says...

I had thought Obama was an iconoclast, beyont politics as usual. I now feel like a FOOL. And i wasted my money of which I had little. This new 'health insurance' is the same old, same old' for me. It's exclusions for 4 more years and premiums i can't afford along with my medicines being too expensive so i can't buy them. For over $800 a month I'm F'ed. *crying*

Thanks for nothing, President Obama. We have a bad economy and unaffordable hellth insurance

[TomCADem]

8. Yet, The Alternative Being Proposed Is Honorable Failure!

The so called progressive alternative given the current make up of the Congress is for President Obama to drop health care reform or to even veto the bill in a dramatic rejection of private insurance. While such a step is dramatic, it would seem to leave you in an even worse position. Reconciliation does not allow the passage of the type of HCR that is being proposed such as single payer, which does not even have the available votes in House. Likewise, you cannot use reconcilliation to outlaw pre-existing conditions. The Republicans are voting an a single obstructionist block, Lieberman is not a Democrat,and many Democrats are actually conservative in their idealogy.

We blame President Obama, yet hold Republicans blameless? Finally, we ignore the simply fact that health care reform has alluded us for decades, since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. This was never going to be easy. Indeed, as the today's polarized political climate has shown, it has gotten even harder with networks like Fox News acting as a 24/7 attack ad.

In this environment, how could we have gotten a better result? All we get in response to this simple question is bitterness and contempt. Worse, we get the advocacy of honorable failure. There is nothing honorable about abandoning health care reform so that we can leave undisturbed some utopian ideal that we hope will one day be achieved in a single swoop.

The fact of the matter is that change is normally, and preferably, incremental. Medicare seems like a no-brainer in restrospect, but it took about five years for both JFK and LBJ to get it past. Yes, contrary to popular mythology, Medicare was JFK's big idea, and it was slogging through Congress during the entirety of JFK's first term, until and after he was assassinated, then finally passed after LBJ was elected. Five years!