Obama And The Public Option - Setting The Record Straight

Obama And The Public Option - Setting The Record Straight

1. The Congressional Budget Office analysis of the public option shows a $150 billion savings and a $6 billion surplus; a public option does not have to pay insurance industry executive salaries, and thus would inherently be able to offer a lower price to the consumer while forcing private insurance companies to do the same, yet will not run private insurance out of business but rather increase their customer base according to the CBO.
   
   
2. Obama's position all year has been that he prefers a public option but would accept any alternative that accomplishes the same results of expanded coverage, portability, lower costs, and budget neutrality.
   
   
3. If such an alternative to a public option that meets all those conditions were actually to emerge, then - guess what - we should all be open to it, too.
   
   
4. However, no alternative to a public option that has been shown to bring down costs to the consumer has yet been provided. The only suggestion thus far, co-ops, have historically failed in every case at bringing down private insurance costs; the burden of proof is thus on the proponents of co-ops to provide clear and convincing evidence that this trend won't be repeated, and thus far, they have offered zilch.
   
   
5. With a failure to explain how to lower consumer costs to make insurance affordable, reform is just an additional yearly multibilliondollar subsidy to insurance companies for leaving an expanding number Americans uninsured and without access to life-saving treatments.
   
   
6. The insurance companies, through signals by many of their Republican spokespeople, now mysteriously seem willing to drop the ability to deny coverage based on pre-existing condition all of a sudden, which - even considering a bigger consumer base for insurance companies under a universal mandate - is still a big sacrifice; the only logical reason they would give in so easily on something that they fought tooth and nail to protect for decades is to close ranks around even bigger prize, which appears to be avoiding the public option at all costs, and if that's where they're drawing their final line in the sand, it suggests that they have concluded that it is the one thing in health care reform that can really change the system and actually force them to bring down their costs.
   
   
7. Soundbites dominate the news; soundbites are also inherantly flawed because they are destined to omit something important unless the topic is incredibly simple, which policy never is
   
   
8. Most media outlets are owned by corporations that are against the public option
   
   
9. The potential for misinformation and misdirection between those last two factors is thus very high, and any representations of the Obama administration's position in soundbite form should be highly suspect, especially those that seem custom made to wreak havoc among the President's supporters, since they are in the interest of the writer/publication and directly against the interests of the administration allegedly being quoted; however, such soundbites are not treated with adequate skepticism in many diaries - or any skepticism at all - but taken as gospel, eagerly jumped on to reaffirm and reassure pre-existing theories.
   
   
10. This trend of partial soundbite analysis (putting credence in soundbites that focus on one part of an Obama administration statement when the policy itself has been the same all along), a trend which had been emerging here all year in the health care debate, got markedly worse last Sunday when the MSM decided to follow suit, misreading a statement by Kathleen Sebelius; while it may have been somewhat helpful that "is the public option dead?" headlines forced the administration to clarify its preference for the public option as well as the continued consistency of its position, we have followed the MSM into what has now become an echo chamber of delusion to retroactively justify its own mistaken sense of reality. Everyone - in the MSM and here - is now sure there was a "trial balloon" that the White House was trying to float and is trying to guess at the motive, even though there is ZERO EVIDENCE that was what Obama was trying to do. While I am generally always one to argue for the President's ability to conceive complex strategies (11 dimensional chess as it is often mocked by critics), in this case, that simply isn't what happened here; there is no sign there was a trial balloon, whether as an intentional effort to fire up the left or to see how bad it would be, but rather that this is just the media echo chamber stroking itself, and - more alarmingly - us playing far too big a part.