Interesting article, but it is speculation. Some of the author's comments are downright silly, like rhetorically wondering why the White House criticizes Howard Dean but not Lieberman, Lincoln or Nelson when the latter are the ones trashing the public option. Gee, could it be that Lieberman, Lincoln and Nelson have voting rights in the Senate and therefore pissing them off right now is a bad idea if they want to get a bill passed, whereas Dean has no vote but is opposing the bill?
While there's some evidence that a deal was cut with Big Pharma to close some of the Medicare Part D doughnut hole in exchange for Big Pharma supporting the bill, the evidence of White House complicity with the insurance industry is sketchier. For one thing, the insurance industry has been opposing the legislation for months now, and running adds to sway public opinion against it. While this posturing against the bill may be a phoney ploy by the industry, it nevertheless seems inconsistent with the theory that they came to an early agreement with the White House.
More likely, Obama met with the industry early on and they told him they were opposed to the public option and believed that they had sufficient sway to kill any bill that included it. Obama then took a cautious tac in how he handled the issue rhetorically. He basically said he supported the idea, but it was optional. That way he would not be locked into the vetoing the bill if the industry did succeed in getting it weeded out. Note that in the early part of the debate after the cloture vote, the White House was signalling the Senate to go with the trigger public option as a compromise, not to kill the public option. This is consistent with Obama wanting the public option but trying to effect a compromise to pass the bill with as much reform as possible, not with a pre-agreement with the industry to kill the public option.
The ditching of the Medicare expansion is also inconsistent with the pre-agreement theory. That expansion would have cost the industry only a few million customers, who were expensive to service anyway. There is no real reason they should have been opposed to it like they were the public option. It appears, rather, that it really was jettisoned because Lieberman was intractable, which in turn is inconsistent with the notion that Obama could just make every Senator do his bidding.
So Russ Feingold says that this "appears" to be what Obama wanted all along, meaning he is making an assumption based on Obama's lukewarm endorsement of it publically rather than any insider information. And Feingold is clearly pissed that the White House apparently hasn't taken a stronger stance on the issue. Doesn't mean much of anything.
What I think happened here is that Obama was aware of what happened when the Clintons tried to pass a health bill. They drafted the bill, took a rigid position on it, and tried to shepard it through Congress. It not only failed, but blew up in their faces. Obama was determined to take the opposite approach this time, and for all the awful compromises he has gotten much farther than the Clintons ever did.
It may be that this bill has been neutered to the point where progressives should just kill it. However, where the blame lies is not entirely clear.
- wolf
Facebook
Twitter