Landrieu: Public Option Skepticism Rooted In Fierce PR Campaign

Right. Because your ability to cross the barrier between alternate universes has allowed you to examine all possible outcomes such that you can confidently assure us that starting with Medicare for all would have inevitably resulted in a better compromise now. No doubt your cross-temporal exploration has also revealed that concerns that doing so would, instead, move the hard right, the insurers, big pharma and the providers into a locked alliance with an unyeliding total war mentality while simultaneously locking the left into a similarly unyeilding war mentality which precluded any possibility of progress, thereby killing the process before it started were totally unfounded.

Yeah, I'm being harsh and, honestly, it's not really about you personally. The thing is that one of the left's absolutely worst traits is its tendency to say "if only they'd done what we were demanding, everything would have turned out better." It's the absolute refusal to acknowledge that there were any discernable risks or potential downsides to doing it their way that really chaps my ass of late.

Yeah, we should have nationalized the biggest banks in the world because the possibility that doing so would accelerate the growing economic panic into a bottomless catastrophe did not exist.

Yeah, we should have decided to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately because there's no possibility that doing so would fail to improve the situation there or, alternately, because the worst thing that could happen wouldn't be anything that would be worse for the U.S. than escalating.

Yeah, fixing DADT and DOMA should have been the very first things the Administration addressed because doing so would inevitably generated much-needed political capital rather than reducing it.

Yeah, the Administration should have just issued a blanket executive order on January 20 ordering the Justice Department to withdrawing its invocation of the state secrets privilege in every case and never assert it again because, hey, it's not like there's ever any need for the secrecy in military matters.

It's the typical ideologue mentality--our ideology says do x and because our ideology dictates that couse of action, the outcome of doing x, whatever that might be, will necessarily be good. That kind of thinking from the right is what got us into the tangle of messes we're in today so forgive me if I view the same thinking from the left with a certain skepticism.

Why any Democrat would KILL all of health care reform because it didn't contain a stripped down, marginal speck of a public option is absurd. It's not leading. If the rules of the Senate allow for a 60 vote majority on legislation (which, with a filibuster, they essentially do), you can either proceed by changing the rules or you can proceed by getting 60 votes. There are not fifty-one senators that are going to change the rules. So, let's work with what we have.

Look at the CHIP. We passed it and now the Democratic Congress is improving it. The key is to get something passed. Achieve universal coverage first and then work to improve it.

The fact that it is a giveaway is irrelevant, in my view. As long as we have no Medicare for all, health care is going to be a giveaway. Besides, you've seen the numbers: only a million people are likely to enroll in the public option and it's likely to cost more than private health plans. Why would anyone stand firm on that? Pass the GD thing without a public option, win in Florida and Arizona and a few other states, make Joe Lieberman irrelevant, and improve the thing with a real public option. It isn't that difficult -- with at least 60 senators who want to pass meaningful health care reform.

Some of them may be. We, at least I, only know the poll figures for national support for health reform and its components such as the public option. What I don't know are the numbers that represent the states these Senators represent. Those numbers may be in line with the public postures they've taken. All in all, I wish they would get with the national numbers and step, up in a positive way, to support this historic opportunity to improve the access to health care for millions of Americans.