Aw Crap.

Posted on 09/02/2009 at 3:28 pm by Bob Cesca

I just don’t like the smell of this quote from Axelrod to ABC News:

As to the fate of a government option plan to compete with private insurance, Axelrod suggested the controversial concept is gone but not forgotten: “The spirit that led him to support a public option is still very much at play here and so you know he wants competition. He wants choice.”

We’ll know for sure what the president’s position is very soon. If he’s bailing on the public option, though, he had better be prepared to lose healthcare reform and many congressional seats next year (as well as 3,000 Americans every two months). And if he intends to drop the public option, but push for mandates, he will have succeeded in proposing my nightmare scenario: a healthcare reform bill that forces us to buy private insurance. Competition or not, this is unacceptable.

Though I want to emphasize this: I don’t know precisely what Axelrod means here. Tapper might be reading too much into the quote. I have no idea, and I don’t want to jump to any firm conclusions until there’s some sort of concrete evidence.

This entry was posted in Healthcare and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • Rollah

    Just as I asked in my comment a few posts below:”… what if Obama is not interested in a public option after all, if for no other reason than Rahm Emanuel doesn’t want big pharma and big insurance donating to the Rs in ’10 or ’12? Single-payer was never on the table. Where does that leave ‘reform’ if it’s not really reform?”

  • http://misterfurious.blogspot.com/ Mr Furious

    I hope that’s a trial balloon.

  • Eric

    As with everything else this last month, who the hell knows? What just occurred to me now is: has Axelrod taken the basic jist of Obama’s message regarding the public option, and ‘enhanced’ it with his own words that more truly represent a projection of his feelings on the matter?I’m exhausted by all of this.(BTW – Bob – based on my own experiences today and what others have posted, there is some bug in the site mechanism that controls signing in. It ‘says’ I’m signed in, but I’m not. I don’t get a correct prompt until I go to the preview window.)

  • Terri

    Is that an “Aw Crap” or a “Boo Hoo”!?The next few days should be interesting.

  • mary from TN

    Bob,Please tell me what a mandate means for someone who cannot possibly afford to buy insurance?I am disabled, still waiting on my appeal to be over with Social Security. I have no chance of getting a job, zero, none. Even if there were an abundance of jobs.I have many, many pre-existing conditions.What will happen to someone like me (or worse off than me?)