The FP already has the link to Nate's piece, which, sadly, makes plenty of sense on the political side of the equation. I disagree w/ him on the policy side, but that's another debate for another day.
As the FP also notes, today's NYT adopts a similar approach. The AP story, which was the lead in today's Miami Herald, echoes that view. The momentum is clearly running in one direction at present.
Yesterday, Kathleen Sebelius
said the public option was "not the essential element" for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.
When your one cabinet member w/ the word "health" in her job title makes such a statement to a national audience, it can be presumed that she is doing to to announce an official shift in position. Either that, or this WH has become so incompetent about message discipline that its ability to pass HRC or any other meaningful legislation is open to serious question.
The following quotes from Robert Gibbs and from, sadly, Obama himself in the AP story reinforce the idea that Sebelius hadn't "gone rogue":
Obama's spokesman refused to say a public option was a make-or-break choice. ``What I am saying is the bottom line for this for the president is, what we have to have is choice and competition in the insurance market,'' White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday.
A day before, Obama appeared to hedge his bets.
``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 healthcare reform,'' Obama said at a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colo. ``This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.''
There's really no point in sugar-coating things at this point. The public option, the sine qua non of HCR on this site, is now viewed by the POTUS whom we helped elect as "a sliver." We will, over the coming weeks, be slowly but surely told that we need to accept this version of poltical reality. We will be told that co-ops will be just as good as the public option would've been and that we must bow to the will of hopelessly compromised Dem committee chairs from megastates like WY and ND.
"Our" Senate Budget Chair said the following on Faux News yesterday:
On Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to produce a bill that features a nonprofit co-op. The author of the idea, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, predicted Sunday that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.
"The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option," Mr. Conrad said on "Fox News Sunday." "There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort."
That's right, one of our key "negotiators" on health care went on a GOP propaganda channel yesterday and called the public option "a wasted effort." He had one-time DINO Richard Shelby sitting next to him at the time calling the co-op plan:
"a step in the right direction," adding: "I don’t know if it will do everything people want, but we ought to look at it. I think it’s a far cry from the original proposals."
I confess that I haven't studied the co-op plan in detail. I know, however, that it's a visible rightward progression from single payer to the public option to co-ops. I know that Silver, who reluctantly approves of this steady shift, says the following:
These are major, major accomplishments. Arguably, they are accomplished at too great a cost. But let's look at it like this. The CBO estimates that the public option would save about $150 billion over the next ten years -- that's roughly $1,100 for every taxpayer. I'm certainly not thrilled to have to pay an additional $1,100 in taxes because some Blue Dog Democrats want to placate their friends in the insurance industry. But I think the good in this health care bill -- the move toward universal-ish coverage, the cost-control provisions -- is worth a heck of a lot more than $1,100.
Most of all, I know that, if the health insurors are as violently opposed to a proposal as they have proven to be, that proposal must have serious merit. The health insurors wouldn't be generously dispensing campaign contributions left and right and they wouldn't be deploying an army of lobbyists unless they knew that the public option would seriously harm their bottom lines. That fact alone tells us everything we need to know about this issue.
I currently have no idea whether I'll support "HCR" w/o a public option. It's a choice of least bad alternatives. What's worse--passing a "reform" bill that doesn't really reform, or seeing Obama suffer a major defeat on the primary legislative initiative of his first 2 years?
I don't have an answer to that question. I was lukewarm at best about the WJC/HRC plan 15 years ago, and I recall not being that upset when it went down in flames. I recall being much more upset when the Dems went down to a resounding defeat in the mid-terms a few weeks later.
While I don't know what to think about the future, I know what I think about the present. Barring a legislative miracle, we're not getting a public option. While I respect and appreciate the efforts of those who are continuing the fight on this issue, the WH clearly flew up the white flag on it over the w/e.