Schumer Signs Public-Option-Via-Reconciliation Letter

Don't you get it? These idiots claim to favor something only when it is obvious there are not enough votes to make it happen. They pass the issues around like a basketball; one week Lieberman is bad guy, next week it is Snow, etc. Feinstein could care less about the middle class, she voted with GW Bush over 80% of the time. Thank her? She ought to be run out of office along with slimey Schumer and the rest of them.
I voted for Obama and worked hard to support the progressive ticket. Now, I realize it was a waste of my time and money. The way these clowns talk, have hearings and do nothing for the American people is an outrage.
These bastards work for and serve the corporations, including the insurance companies. The supreme court made it official last month, now we have no voice and no vote. What does Congress do? Talk about something else, jobs or health care, neither of which go anywhere at all.
Thank these clowns if you like, but you are making a fool of yourself.

I would be happy to.

Thanks for the condescension, but I don't think you know remotely enough about me to make that assertion. As i've posted elsewhere, I have put my heart on my sleeve supporting the public option again and again. I have rallied in public repeatedly in favor of its inclusion and made sure my representatives know I support it. But I inhabit reality. And I am still focused on getting a decent, comprehensive bill passed, even of there aren't the votes for this one provision. Public option fetishists like you are operating like you would rather obsess over that one provision than actually get a decent bill passed. Can we agree that, short the requisite number of votes a bill or provision within a bill cannot become law? And is, therefore, useless as a matter of concrete -- not abstract -- public policy? Please tell me where you guys are hiding the magic votes that will get the public option (or even some symbolic vestige of a public option) through the Senate --by reconciliation or any other means. I already know that a bill including a real public option is better policy than one without. What never ceases to amaze me how many progressives who supposedly support comprehensive health care reform are obsessed with this one provision to the point that they effectively oppose the passage of any legislation that does not include it.

Once it reaches critical mass? What does that mean? The point when opponents of the public option and of reconciliation -- conservative Democrats in conservative states who have hard ideological, policy and, most of all, political incentives to oppose those things are magically converted? I do, have and always will support the public option. Read my other posts if you'd like. My senators are Schumer and Gillibrand and I think it's nice they support this; and I've told their staffers so. So, long as doing so doesn't become a counterproductive distraction from actually getting comprehensive legislation passed. When you say, "there will continue to be grave dissension within the party that hampers any chance of health care reform" are you talking about the true believers who would rather kill comprehensive reform entirely than see one pet provision fail to pass? My peers on the left who think they've never seen a greater barrier to progress than Obama or Reid? The Democrats in extremely safe House districts who'd rather pander to and delude their most liberal supporters instead of facing reality and passing the best bill that could (pre-Scott Brown) actually clear the Senate? Whether you're on to something or not I suspect will come down to this: how will the purists who say they want a public option or nothing, who say they'll stay home this fall without one, react when the Senate simply doesn't have the votes to pass the public option via reconciliation? Will they be encouraged and energized that Democrats tried? Or, will they feel doubly demoralized, angry and betrayed, because they were led, once again, to believe that the Democrats could somehow do what they wanted, in spite of not having the requisite votes? I'll make a promise to you, since I sincerely believe we're on the same side: I will continue to do what you recommend; we're both supporters of the public option. afterall. Please promise me that if it doesn't make it through, you'll work just as hard to pass the best possible reform legislation, and do your best to convince your angry progressive friends that even a middling bill that insures thirty million more Americans and imposes serious restraints on insurance company abuses is far, far better than failing entirely in a paroxysm of purity.

Don't feed the trolls. Tropicgal is a troll.

No. Honestly they assert mandates are necessary because of a completely speculative belief in human nature without a lick of empirical evidence to back it up (or if it exists, I've not been able to track it down and never debated anyone who can produce it). It's called the "free rider" theory. According to this theory, nobody who is healthy would ever elect to purchase insurance without being coerced. That most would wait to get coverage until they are critically ill and had developed a preexisting condition that in today's market would bar them from purchasing coverage.

To me it is kind of absurd on it's face. Obama's position was that we should ensure the programs in place were effective and make mandate determinations based on empirical evidence. Which is the logical way to do it. Pretty easy to add a mandate if the system isn't working. Pretty much impossible to strip one once it's in there by virtue of granting an undocumented theory the mantle of truth.

But even granting a genuine belief in the free-rider unicorn, the reason this bill represents a sell out is because it mandates coverage and then leaves the ability to price-fix within the hands of the insurance industry. It uses essentially the same mechanism for cost containment as was built into TARP to unfreeze credit for small businesses and to save underwater homeowners: ask the industry "pretty please with sugar on top."

At the same time, they are putting millions of people on the dole and promising the insurance industry the government will buy policies at full market rate on the individual market for all of them - with the reimbursement rates set based on an easy to game formula. This motivates upwards price pressure on the low-end of the insurance market. Logic would seem to follow that anyone stuck buying at the low end, who doesn't get a government financed plan will see prices rocket - and their new penalty tax will be handed right to an insurance company to pay for someone else's policy.

And don't give me shit about the medical loss ratios. The insurance companies own medical services companies. They just move the costs into the delivery side. The shareholders take a bit of a hit, but the executives get a great bonus for growing the subsidiary's business. Trust me. We lost Cigna as a client when they bought Inracorp even though Intracorp ended up charging them about 5x the rate for lesser services specifically to pad the profits of Cigna executives who put the deal together and got a cut of the growth. This whole thing is a fucking scam, they had your number long before this ever came down the pike. There is nothing in the Senate bill they don't already have a loophole for.

That is why it's a sell out.