A currentdiary which I accuse of over intellectualizing its way off the mark on health care reform, uses this popular meme to dismiss the public option:
...the public option was the key component because it would allow people to opt-out of the private insurance system that they oppose on moral and ideological grounds.
The public option is not a moral or ideological construct, and opting out is seldom done for moral or ideological reasons. The public option is a business construct - an improvement, a way to economize, a business process tune-up. For those non-corporate types: a vent, an off-ramp right before a traffic pile-up, a plan ready to be chosen when you fear the stagnant mass of vehicles on an aged freeway may crumble from its own the weight.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the debate on "corporatism" that the ideological view of health care reform has surfaced. But to more fully enjoy it, I must make this important clarification.
When the President said this, much attention was paid to his walking away from the public option as a campaign issue. But the phrase that both intrigued and angered me most is in bold:
"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap in the perceptions of compromise and the reality of compromise than in the health care bill," Obama said.
He then listed several things he called for during the campaign that he considers to be part of the bill, including coverage for the uninsured, new rules for insurance companies, tax breaks for small businesses and measures that rein in growing costs.
"Every single criteria for reform that I put forward is in this bill," Obama said. "It is true that the Senate version does not have a public option, and that has become, I think, a source of ideological contention between the left and the right. But I didn't campaign on a public option. I think it is a good idea. But as I said in that speech on Sept. 9 (on health care), it is just one small element of a broader reform effort. And so we don't feel that the core elements to help the American people that I campaigned on and that we've been fighting for all year have been compromised in any significant way."
Specifically the word, ideological.
I understand this is the WH selected framing to dismiss the public outcry us, the rabid lambs, the goal-post of convenience looney left, along with the public option.
Even Joe Lieberman stayed on message:
A spokesman for Joe Lieberman, whose talent for annoying liberals seems to have grown exponentially in the heat of the health care fight, is now responding to a liberal group’s new ad hammering the Senator by dismissing the public option as the "agenda of narrow ideological interest groups."
I can see a product roll-out when it's shoved down my throat.
But does the President actually believe this nonsense - the public option as an ideological construct? Perhaps so. Perhaps it is why, according to him and Congress, he did not push, did not use the power of his office to advance this element so important to strategic, long term health care reform. Ideological! That is one huge cognitive dissonance that may have crippled the chances for sustainable reform and believe me, the public option was not exactly world class engineering. It was a last ditch effort in creating, if not a next generation bullet train, at least an off-ramp from the worst of a broken down highway infrastructure.
The public option makes me think of those terrifying rush hour drives after earthquakes in Los Angeles when with shaky voices and rattled nerves everyone goes back to work. Especially the earthquakes that make freeways collapse or crack up visually. Or those late afternoon shakers that sway your office tower and make music with the glass windows just before calling it a day. I could rev my 300 horsepower car and get home in comfort in no time at all but not until I pass through the interchange from hell - a gatekeeper to four freeways that was once an engineering marvel but on these nerve-wracked days only its age and fault lines show.
I'd hold my breadth the entire 2 mph segment of the trip home through Los Angeles's infamous 4-level As I slowly entered the darkened cave-like passage my eyes would stretch wide open, left right left right, inspecting every inch in sight of the pile of freeway interchanges stacked up on top of each other like...I shudder to think it...pancakes...and the slow grinding stretch through The Slotaching from my extended neck bent forward, left right, to inspect each overpass. Would I live or die? Will it fall and crush me? Is that a crack? A fissure? Is the car rumbling another earthquake? Where can I get off? Where's the next off ramp? Let me out of here....
For individuals, the public option is a choice, a way out of an administrivial hell system that is growing more obsolete with each great shift of progress and population rise.
For US businesses competing on a global scale the public option is leveling the field. Being the only corporations competing while carrying the overhead of employee benefits is an albatross, an unnecessary relic ready for retirement. The public option may not have changed the business world overnight but it would be a growing asset in every bottom line.
For the nation, the public option is a tactical approach to a thorny business re-engineering need when strategic transformation change was decided to be so "disruptive" that it wasn't even evaluated. It's Business Re-engineering 101 - remove the removable, tune, in his case, the flow of money to steer it in a value added direction, stream line the delivery of health care and improve the distribution of precious resources to be available when and where they're needed. We know the drill. Some of us have implemented these practices for decades and millions of us have had our jobs sacrificed in the relentless pursuit of increasing shareholder value.
No company would defer the elimination of a redundant or obsolete part of their business so as to increase ROI.
No company would hesitate to be the umptenth corporation to announce at any given Christmas time that they're to lay off 300,000 workers to increase ROI or raise short term prospects.
Yet Congress and the President have arbitrarily decided that some businesses are their responsibility to protect, and defend, at our cost, limiting our choice, and our survivability.
Americans demanding choice, a leaner meaner system, the choice to cut the fat is not ideological. It's math, Mr. President. It's engineering, traffic flow, queuing theory, continuous improvement, infrastructure upgrade, survival - business survival as well as the urge for personal survival.