I'm at a complete loss about this. The president in a Colorado town hall yesterday:
"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it," Obama said. "And by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else."
This certainly sounds like the president is damning the public option as just another throwaway provision in the reform plan. Which, of course, is absolutely not the case. The public option isn't a sliver -- it's a very important chunk of the whole thing.
Politically, the broader signal this sends is the president seems much more willing to jettison it. For some reason. Perhaps it's the Senate blue dogs and a lack of votes. Perhaps it's the Republicans. Perhaps (looking at the cup half full) it's part of this current head fake about wanting to continue the bipartisanship effort. I have no idea. But I think we, his base, deserve a fuller explanation.
Benen quoted Paul Krugman who made an excellent point about the public option and its inclusion: "It's not so much that the public option has to be in the final bill, but if it's not in, there better damn well be something else, some really serious reforms. In a sense, it has become a litmus test. If the bill does not have a public option, it's going to take a much, much higher bar on the rest of it to get me to accept it."
I absolutely agree with this. If there's no public option and, instead, a non-profit co-op situation, then the regulations, the co-op and the reforms contained in the bill would have to collectively achieve everything the public option would've forced upon the health insurance marketplace.
To that point, there's one thing no amount of regulation can solve without a public option, and that is allowing us to have health insurance without subsidizing the criminal private insurers. In other words, one major plus with the public option is that I wouldn't be giving money to an industrial sector that I consider to be a criminal syndicate. There's a conscience factor about the public option that I find very appealing. Because even with serious regulations, I'd have a very difficult time paying premiums to Blue Cross or Aetna or Cigna.
Back to the politics. Ultimately, the president is falling prey to the dreaded DCD (Democratic Capitulation Disease). And I'm wondering whether it ends here, or if whenever the blue dogs and Republican stomp their tiny feet the president will relegate more items to the "sliver" category. At this point, he's definitely set a precedent for doing so.