WASHINGTON — With Democrats reeling from the Republican victory in the Massachusetts special Senate election, President Obama on Wednesday signaled that he might be willing to set aside his goal of achieving near-universal health coverage for all Americans in favor of a stripped-down measure with bipartisan support...
Here's an appropriate response:
Yes, the people hate the health care bill because it doesn't f*ck them enough and is too stingy to the kind insurance companies. This is what happens when you have a media that belongs to the right-wing.
[tip o'teh tinfoil to Avedon]
Digby, who also predicted this reaction, notes:
...Howard Dean goes on Hardball today and points out that today's DFA poll shows that of all the people who voted for both Obama and Brown, three out of five voted for Brown because they had wanted a public option and of the Obama voters who stayed home, 80% wanted a public option...
Somebody really should tell the Villagers that there is no public option in the current health care bill, only a mandate that forces everyone to buy into cheap coverage, and a tax on policies that provide decent care. The net effect of the tax would be to lower the quality of coverage per dollar spent. So nobody wants the bill to pass, and not because of the public option.
But that would be telling, wouldn't it? The main$tream has no intention of listening to people like Dean. It's not how they make their money.
Robert Scheer:
The president got creamed in Massachusetts. No amount of blaming this disastrous outcome on the weaknesses of the local Democratic candidate or her Republican opponent’s strengths can gainsay that fact. Obama’s opportunistic search for win-win solutions to our health care concerns and our larger economic problems is leading to a lose-lose outcome for the president and the country.
The two issues that mattered on Election Day were the economy, which Obama has sold out to Wall Street—as quite a few disgruntled voters pointed out—and his plea to save health care reform, which the voters who had backed him for the presidency with a huge majority now spurned. It is significant that it was the voters of Massachusetts who have now derailed the Democrats’ efforts to revamp the country’s health care system by denying them the necessary 60th vote in the Senate, for these voters know the subject well.
The federal proposal is based on their own state’s model requiring people to obtain health insurance without the state doing anything to effectively control costs through an alternative to the private insurance corporations. Lacking a public option, the cost of health care in Massachusetts, already the highest in the nation at the time of the plan’s implementation, has spiraled upward. Services have been curtailed, and many, particularly younger people, feel they are being forced to sacrifice to pay for a system that doesn’t work.
Instead of blindly following the failed Massachusetts model, Obama should have insisted on an extension of the Medicare program to all who are willing to pay for it...
But you see, that would have worked, and the goal was not to really do anything about health care, any more than Obama really wants to do anything about the economy. The goal is to make a whole lot of money for the bank$ters. How would giving people jobs and keeping them healthy enough to work make the Right people any richer?
Timothy Egan:
...While the filibuster-proof margin is gone, the Democrats still have a 58 seats in the Senate — perhaps 59, depending on Joe Lieberman’s loyalty of the hour. This huge majority, as America’s most astute political observer, Jon Stewart, pointed out, is far more than George W. Bush ever had, and he used it to do whatever he wanted to with the country.
Critics will say: listen to the people, the voters don’t want health care. But in fact, when you break out the major points on reform — getting rid of policies that deny coverage for preexisting conditions, expanding care and choice, forcing insurers to put more money into treatment and less in their pockets – there is strong support. Majorities also back a public option, but that’s off the table, for now. See Lieberman, Traitor Joe.
What people are against is “the bill” — this radioactive product of arcane deal-making. They even tried to keep C-Span out! What is there to hide? Who knows. But most people believe it will add to the deficit, instead of reduce costs as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said.
Democrats swept the land in 2008 by running on a couple of things: not being George Bush, change in the economy, health care and getting rid of a lobbyist-rich culture in Washington that seemed to work only for those on the inside. The voters, as in Massachusetts on Tuesday, knew what they doing.
If Democrats were to waste this majority, and have nothing to show for it but bailouts of the biggest banks, auto companies and insurers, they deserve to be returned to minority status in the fall.
Who are they governing for? They can cowboy up, pass health care that helps right the major wrongs of the system and then explain what they’re doing. One way to start is to point to the bottom line, the market, and ask who gets rich when nothing changes.
In deciphering motivation, Occam's razor is an amazingly effective tool once you simply assume it's greed and start to follow the money. Follow the money. It works every time.
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