Post sees light

The editorial board of the Washington Post gives Obama sound advice today by admitting that he should drop proposals for a “public option”.

This is not a matter of ideology but of political nose-counting. The kind of comprehensive health reform that the president rightly wants — changes that would extend affordable coverage to millions of people and help slow the growth of health-care costs — requires 60 votes in the Senate. Democrats could muscle through some provisions with 50 votes, but a Senate rule limits how much can be done through that route. Measures such as establishing insurance exchanges or imposing new coverage requirements on insurance companies, as President Obama has been emphasizing, might be vulnerable to being stricken. And there’s no way to amass 60 votes with a public option in the bill.

Whether the Obama Administration really wants health care reform or if they’re just using it as political leverage will determine their next move(s). Obviously, there is not strong support for the public in Congress. In fact, Dave Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat, promised his constituents that he’d shave his head if he ever voted for the public option.

Democrats would lose a big issue if they ever passed the public option, anyway – they don’t want to do that. It’s much easier to blame Republicans for the failure of health care reform than to actually give Americans an option that actually works.

A commenter in the Washington Post misses the point completely;

rcasero wrote:
NO. The WH should ditch any attempt to work with Republicans. They have been nothing but obstructionists.

Yeah, it’s not the Republicans causing this to fail, it’s Democrats. The President’s party controls the House and Senate (like they did in 1993 when Hillarycare failed) – they don’t need Republicans to pass this bill, based on sheer numbers. If it was a workable plan, Democrats should be able to get it through on their own.

But I guess it’s easier to just blame those evil Republicans and the nebulous “lobbyists”.

I doubt, however that the ideologues in the Democrat Party – the same bozos who opposed the war only because it was a Republican war – will allow the Obama Administration to walk away from the public option. They’d rather watch it die a slow and painful death than to actually accomplish something.

Actually, so would I, but for more practical reasons.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Health Care debate