Three cheers to Cong. Raul Grijalva and Cong. Lynn Woolsey, co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, for not backing down in the face of intense pressure.
The NEW LETTER they sent today to President Obama, demanding a meeting with him to push the public option, shows they are playing hardball with the White House. Beyond our progressive heroes here and at Firedoglake, Grijalva, Woolsey and Co. are our only thread of hope (well, maybe with Tom Harkin and a few others over in the Senate, as well!) for getting a robust public option. This is particularly true after the president made it abundantly clear in recent days -- including in last night's inspiring, if somewhat underwhelming on the specifics, speech -- that the public option is purely optional right now.
Bottom line: The White House is walking into a trap if it rams through any of the non-public option alternatives, several of which will be FAR worse than nothing, and will tie all future health care disasters and discontent around the neck of the Democratic Party.
Without a robust public option, any health care reform legislation that is approved -- with primarily Democratic votes, mind you (as in, you broke it, you bought it!) -- could lead the Democratic Party into a political disaster.
"Mandates" would force folks to buy costly, crappy private insurance that lines the pockets of fat-cat insurance executives, and FINES (at least in the Baucus Plan, here and here) up to $3800 for not doing so -- without a robust, immediately available national public option will cause the average American to see Democrats as advocates for the very corporations that got Americans into this mess. Just as important, when it all goes to shite -- which it will, since the system is deteriorating ANYWAY -- the Republicans will fall all over themselves blaming US, the Democratic Party, for the "compromises" that THEY themselves pushed for! We will be damaged politically for years to come.
"Triggers" and "co-ops" will be exposed as the empty effort it would be. Americans will not be fooled, given that they are in such dire straits already. The Democrats will be seen as weak and solicitous of the corporate powers that be, and will be punished at the polls. And given the tremendous power to buy off politicians in both parties, it's safe to say, as Krugman recently noted, that triggers either will never be "pulled" and/or they and any "co-ops" plans will be engineered in such an industry-favoring way that they what's implemented will never seriously threaten big insurance's regional monopolies and oligopolies (not to be confused with "oligarhies" mind you...).
Rather than shoring up the president and the Party in polls, the NON-public option options will alienate not only the progressive base that elected the president, but the bulk of Americans who will saddle OUR Party with every discontent they have with their health care, or the fines they have to pay for not knuckling under and paying the blood-sucking private insurers. The health insurers and Big Pharma will have found a political "underwriter" to cover their terrible political opinion "losses" -- and we will be the dupes (and dopes) who took the bait.
But it ain't over yet: The House Progressive Caucus might just yet save the Party, and the Obama administration, from itself. We are poised on the knife-edge of history here. One side leads to disarray and decline, the other to what could be a decade or more of consolidated Democratic dominance. This well-intentioned but ill-considered effort to get "some HCR, any HCR!" will completely backfire for the Democratic Party, and would damage any hopes of a progressive agenda. Our friends in the Progressive Caucus are once again coming to a firm defense of what's right, and may be the only elected Party officials standing in the way of said potential disaster:
From The Plum Line, Greg Sargent's blog:
Liberals Crank Up Heat, Send Obama Another Letter Demanding Meeting
Speech or no speech, it looks like House liberals have no intention whatsoever of easing their pressure on Obama to keep a meaningful public option in the health care bill.
House progressive leaders just sent another letter to the President — which was sent over by a source — reiterating their demand for inclusion of the public option and insisting on a face to face meeting to discuss it.
"We were pleased that you explicitly expressed your support for a public option as a central piece of achieving true reform," says the letter, which is signed by Dem Reps. Raul Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey, co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "We look forward to meeting with you regarding your support for defining the public option in any final health care reform bill and request that the meeting take place as soon as possible."
The letter adds that "public opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Americans want the choice of a robust public plan and we stand in solidarity with them."
"We look forward to meeting with you to discuss the importance of your continued support for a robust public option in the final bill," the letter reiterates.
As TPM reported yesterday, Obama had originally promised a meeting to progressives, but mysteriously, it never materialized — hence the reiterated demand for a face-to-face.
While Obama did offer far more expansive support for the public option than expected, he hinted at the possible use of coops or a trigger, which are both unacceptable to liberals. Combine this letter with the fact that Tom Harkin, the chair of the Senate HELP committee, said today that a public option won’t be a dealbreaker, and you’ve really got a serious intra-Dem split in the works.
In sum: "Something" is NOT better than nothing: THIS IS A TRAP being laid by the Southern Rump Party and its insurance and pharma industry allies. And our hapless (and/or respectively bought off) leadership and elected officials are poised to take the bait unless we, including our heroic Progressive Caucus heroes, can save them from themselves. We have a responsibility to oppose bad policies, even from "our" president. He solicited such push back during and after the campaign, so we owe it to him and to ourselves. Passive silence is not loyalty. It's co-dependence.
Despite some assertions to the contrary, "Triggers" or "triggered public option" or "mandates" without a robust PO (and especially with fines or big taxes!) will enrage and alienate half the U.S. population, and become an albatross that will hang around our necks and haunt Democrats for years to come. Any of these roads will be FAR worse than nothing, because such legislation will allow the Repugs, with the help of the mush head traditional media, to tie ANY future health care failures to us.
As I've half-seriously suggested before, the "trigger" and "mandate" (or "triggered public option") crap is a like a venus flytrap for a bug. The political nectar looks real, but if we take the bait we will be needlessly caught, killed, digested and spit out in the end. Let's try to avoid being that bug, and continue in the 11th hour to try to save the Obama Administration and the Dems from themselves.
UPDATED: Thanks for comments and tips, y'allzes -- and here are a few other links from some of our esteemed colleagues on the same or similar issues:
http://healthcarebeyondpartisanship....
http://www.dailykos.com/...