Sebelius Unveils State By State Analysis Of Impact Of Health Care Reform

Beat a dead horse comment: it would be nice if we could follow up on Josh's posts. That's how blogs work, right?

Anyway, to thread drift:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/11/more_thoughts_on_the_public_option.php

As a lot of people have pointed out, the value of the PO is two fold:

* it draws GOP/ConservaDems/Blue Dog/Big Health attention away from *other* potential rollbacks

* simply creating it allows for something to be built open

On the first, we knew that there would be a constant ConservaDems/Blue Dog effort to water down all aspects of the bill. And they have, with all sorts of things. But the PO has draw tremendous attention and effort to try to kill off, which has allowed Progressive to hold firm on other things while "compromising" repeatidly on the PO. If it already died, we would be talking about subsidies being cut more, etc.

On the second, we're getting to why Big Health doesn't want it in any form. Medicare wasn't the Medicare we have now when it was passed. Social Security wasn't the Social Security we have now when it was passed. They were foundations that were built on and frame works expanded upon.

If you get a PO, you then can down the road do Reconciliation on aspects of it. But you have a great difficulty of creating the PO out of whole cloth in Reconciliation.

That's why Big Health wants to kill it dead.

I'm in complete agreement with people who say that the PO that's left in the bill is almost a meaningless PO if that's all that ever happens to it.

But I also think that if people like Robert Reich take a step back and look at the long term potential for the framework, especially when out health system hits the wall (which is sooner than later with the small amounts of reform in this package), is the value of it.

So it is worth fighting for on the two reasons above: creates a framework to expand, and also has drawn massive fire and political capital away from other items that ConservaDems and Blue Dogs would like to see watered down as well.

John