Wow! You guys are amazing! Last night, we hit the $100,000 mark in showing our support to the 65 progressive Democrats who stood up for us on the public option against the White House and the Democratic leadership.
Let me be clear on this, the White House still doesn't understand why the public option is so important to us and to our Democrats in the House when you have the likes of Rahm Emanuel posturing as an anonymous aide with this quote:
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."
Rahm, we are NOT the left, we are a MAJORITY of Americans who desperately need health care reform, not health insurance reform, and the public option as Howard Dean says is a crucial element in keeping private insurers honest and in lowering premiums for us Americans! After all, it was President Barack Obama who said a month ago:
July 17, 2009: Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans – including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest – and choose what’s best for your family.
And his recent shift on the public option just a few days ago:
August 15, 2009: All I'm saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else.
President Obama drew a line in the sand for the public option a month ago on July 17, 2009, and now I'm hearing that in his conference strategy call for Thursday at 2:30PM, that he's planning to say that he won't draw a line in the sand for the public option. If President Obama can draw a line in the sand for the public option a month ago, then why can't he draw a line in the sand for it right now?
He is likely to repeat what he and his top surrogates have said for months: that he will not "draw a line in the sand" about the inclusion of a public plan and that no one provision is a "deal breaker" as long as the final legislation embraces his broad principles for reform.
The answer is that he's still trying to find a bipartisan compromise with the Senate moderates and the Republicans in the Senate. I know that there's the NYT Times article saying that the Democrats might go it alone on health care reform. But then there's this in the Politico article:
The aides call it more a prediction than a strategy shift, and blame the GOP. "We were forced into this by Republicans," one official said. West Wing aides are rewriting their strategy in an effort to eke out the votes they need, perhaps the bare minimum. The House-Senate split over whether to include a government-run plan is likely to make the final bill "very tough" to sell to enough Democrats to pass, leadership aides tell us.
When you're calling the NYT Times article a "prediction" rather than an actual strategy shift, then what the NYT article is a "trial balloon"in order to bring the Senate moderates back on board to push even more strongly for regional co-operatives:
Democratic senators might feel more empowered, for example, to define the authority of the nonprofit insurance cooperatives that are emerging as an alternative to a public insurance plan.
And the way to stop this from happening? By showing our progressives in Congress that we have their back because the White House and aides like Rahm Emmanuel is going to try to twist their arms into accepting the "regional co-operatives" if the Senate moderates insist on it being in the final package.
It's why we've raised our fundraising goal from $100,000 to $150,000 for our health care heroes in Congress! We need them to hold very firm on this issue because the progressives will have their arms twisted, face a lack of funding from the Democratic party apparatus, and have their donors called.
Can you please recommend this diary so we can hit our goal of $150,000 today?
UPDATE: We've just released our petition to the 65 Progressives in Congress urging them to keep firm on the public option. The last time we had a petition, we had over 35,000 signatures. I know that we can get twice more than that!
So, please sign the petition, and send the link if you can to all your friends and family that you know wants the public option!
UPDATE 2: The White House JUST SAID that it still wants a bipartisan bill! Enough of this crap from Rahm, and let's stick by our progressives in this fight!
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration remains committed to drawing Republican support for the bill, particularly in the Senate.
“I don't know why we would short-circuit that now,” Gibbs told reporters.
He said the White House believes some Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee “are still working in a constructive way to get reform through the Senate and ultimately to the president's desk.”