The Flathead Valley’s Leading Independent Journal of Observation, Analysis, & Opinion

16 June 2009

Obama & Democrats to poison public option against single-payer

Revised. I’ve reluctantly concluded that President Obama and congressional Democrats expect — and intend — to inflict on the nation a health care system based on the Massachusetts plan (private health insurance, a requirement to buy health insurance, and subsidies for those the government thinks cannot afford insurance), which for all intents and purposes is Richard Nixon’s plan for preventing a single-payer system.

I’ve also concluded that the so-called “public option” that Democrats who should be smarter have embraced is what will be sacrificed on the altar of bipartisanship. Obama is stumping for a public option not because he expects, or even wants, it enacted into law, but because it’s a worthless bargaining chip unless the Republicans think he really wants it.

In the meantime, his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, is making it perfectly clear that not only do Democrats reject a single-payer system, they intend to poison public option legislation, should they get it by some fluke, to prevent that public option from evolving into a single-payer system. Here’s what she told NPR’s Morning Edition today:

“This is not a trick. This is not single-payer,” Sebelius told Steve Inskeep. She added: “That’s not what anyone is talking about — mostly because the president feels strongly, as I do, that dismantling private health coverage for the 180 million Americans that have it, discouraging more employers from coming into the marketplace, is really the bad, you know, is a bad direction to go.”

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Republicans have also raised the specter that a public option could evolve into a single-payer health care system where funding comes from one source — usually the government. The GOP says that such a system would lead to health care rationing and long delays in treatment.

Asked if the administration’s program will be drafted specifically to prevent it from evolving into a single-payer plan, Sebelius says: “I think that’s very much the case, and again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion.”

She’s right about single-payer advocates being furious. As Bill Moyers reported a couple of weeks ago, earlier in this decade, Obama supported a single-payer system, arguing that it would be possible when Democrats once again controlled the White House and Congress. Well, now Democrats do control the White House and Congress — but Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance control the Democrats, so Obama’s position on health care has evolved from a humane solution to an embrace of Big Health Care’s monkey-business. This is change, but it’s not progress — and it’s sure as hell not what I voted for.