Instead of just screaming this idea in the comments of veratis' liveblog of Obama's townhall today with the AARP, I thought of posting a quickie diary.
Today, without prompting, Obama reaffirmed his support for the public option and creating a health insurance exchange market. He did it in an answer to his first question and he repeated it multiple times at length.
This should be the headline we're promoting for today. And if the MSM were sticking to their own BS rules about covering conflict over policy and substance, we'd be hearing all about how Obama "fought back" or "lashed out" at members of the Senate Finance Committee who are trying to scuttle key elements of health care reform.
Jump.
We've all experienced our fair share of disheartening news, and the uncertainty surrounding the health care negotiations in Congress is enough to leave people feeling nervous about where things are going. It's not enough to just trust the best intentions of our politicians.
However, we should remember that our ability to extract a real sense about what's happening on Capitol Hill has been wildly distorted and misshaped by the Washington press, which is hell bent on front-paging every setback as some kind of debilitating blow to reform. One of the main goals of reform opponents in the GOP and the health care industry, aside from delay and defeat, is demoralization of the reform coalition. They want to split and divide us. They want to paint us into a tight corner on negotiations so that compromise on smaller issues becomes impossible without jeopardizing the big issues.
And that's why it's so vitally important to take note of what President Obama said today.
Despite all the bad news from Max Baucus and Co. yesterday, and regardless of perceptions that Robert Gibbs waffled on the WH's commitment to the public option, the president himself took to the stage today and restated his position on health reform without hesitating.
It's easy to lose focus and vent our frustration on whether the people supposedly on our side are doing all they can or shouting loud enough to push everything through all at once. But it's more productive to remind everyone, including people in the press, that the pro-reform, pro-competition, pro-public-option, side of the debate is live and well.
And when we keep calling our Senators and Members of Congress, we're doing so to remind them that we are in fact standing for something.
We are standing for what Sen. Sherrod Brown said yesterday:
We’re going to have a strong public option. That’s going to be a major part of our health care bill.
We're standing for the plan supported by plan supported by Sens. Durbin, Leahy, and Schumer.
We're standing for Henry Waxman in the House.
We're standing with the 50 million Americans without health insurance.
We're standing with the future generations of Americans who do not want to pour endless streams of our national wealth into a wasteful health care system that costs more and provides for less.
And most importantly, we're standing with the plan proposed by President Obama: the plan that got him elected and the plan he reaffirmed today in North Carolina.
Folks, this game is still on.
Updates: Folks are understandably looking for quotes and transcripts from the town hall. I'm looking for some of these now, but many of the early news reports are not focusing on this angle of the story. Hence this diary.
To start, here's Obama telling an anecdote about "socialized medicine" from a woman who told him she didn't want government-run health care, but "don't touch my Medicare." Obama explains that we're not doing anything close to that, but rather setting up a market where people can choose between public and private plans.
With a big thanks to soms in the comments below, here's a transcript as provided by the Washington Post:
And the other thing that we do want to do -- now, this is controversial, and I understand some people are worried about this -- we do think that it makes sense to have a public option alongside the private option, so you could still choose a private insurer, but we'd also have a public plan that you could choose from that would be not for profit, wouldn't have, hopefully, some of the same high administrative costs, and would be potentially more responsive to your needs at a lower cost. I think that helps keep the insurance companies honest, because now they have somebody to compete with. And I have to say, the reason this has been controversial is, you know, a lot of people have heard this phrase "socialized medicine" and they say, "We don't want government-run health care. We don't want a Canadian-style plan."
Nobody is talking about that. We're saying: Let's give you a choice. You can choose the private marketplace or this other approach.
And, you know, I got a letter the other day from a woman. She said, "I don't want government-run health care. I don't want socialized medicine. And don't touch my Medicare."
And
We want clear, easy-to-understand, straightforward insurance that people can purchase. So that's point number one.
Point number two is, in addition to those reforms, we want to make sure that we set up what's called a health insurance exchange so that anybody who wants insurance but can't get it on their job right now, they can go to this exchange, they can select a plan that works for them or their families. These are private-option plans, but we also want to have a public option that's in there.
But whatever you select, you will get high-quality care for a reasonable cost, the same way Congress, members of Congress are able to select from a menu of plans that they have available. And if you're very -- if the plan that you select is still too expensive for your income, then we would provide you a little bit of help so that you could actually afford the coverage.
So the idea behind reform is, number one, we reform the insurance companies so they can't take advantage of you.
I'll also add that this story is already getting lost, thanks to the ever so helpful staff at the Associated Press, who decided the most interesting thing to report from the Q&A was Obama's revelation (!) that he and Michelle have living wills.
And yes, DKos TV now has the video: