Are we all getting played?

No, not just by the corporate whoremedia (THAT is a given) but what if all of these vague and sometimes contradictory news stories streaming out of the WH regarding Obama and the Public Option that's got everybody here in a tizzy right now are INTENDED to put EVERYBODY "off balance" leading up to his speech later this month? What if what we're going through right now is simply a massive "psy-ops" operation run by the WH to get to where Obama wants to go?
I know that I'll probably get accused of even suggesting the oft-scoffed-at idea that Obama "plays chess" politically but, given how masterfully he ran his campaign last year (starting around this same exact time period if I recall correctly), I have to at least wonder. I wonder if Obama is just trying to keep everybody, Republicans AND Democrats guessing and speculating where exactly he'll finally come down on health care reform in his upcoming speech so that the Pubs won't know what to do until it's too late?
It could be that all of this mass of confusion is a sign of an inept and inexperienced administration but Obama's history doesn't suggest this to me.
Maybe it's not even "chess" he's playing at this time. Maybe he's playing "trap door spider" with the Pubs this time? :shrug:
I humbly invite your thoughts, opinions, criticism, insults, etc.

:popcorn:

They start a rumor campaign of "No Public Option" and then surprise everyone with a phony "Public Option" that the media will triumph as a bold political move.

as opposed to "real" one? :shrug:

The people who brought us the “public option” began their campaign promising one thing but now promote something entirely different. To make matters worse, they have not told the public they have backpedalled. The campaign for the “public option” resembles the classic bait-and-switch scam: tell your customers you’ve got one thing for sale when in fact you’re selling something very different.

When the “public option” campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge “Medicare-like” program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation’s largest health insurer, public or private. But today “public option” advocates sing the praises of tiny “public options” contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public options” described in the Democrats’ legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the “public options” cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the “public option” movement haven’t told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It’s high time they did.

...


http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%E2%80%9Cpublic-option%E2%80%9D-was-sold/

Long read full of good info.....

But it's still a PO and IMHO it would at least be a start, a step in the right direction. As I recall, Social Security was initially rather limited at first but was gradually improved upon over the succeeding years. The same could and probably would happen with a PO. The important thing for me would be getting the concept into law first and then building upon it later along with some other badly needed insurance reforms. What Obama said at his July presser about the importance of getting past the natural "inertia" of doing nothing about HCR rings very true IMHO.

will hurt people and draw a massive backlash against the concept. People will not accept "oh, that was a bad one, we need a better one". They will recoil from the very idea. It will be much akin to trying to argue that "communism is a good idea, it was just never properly applied". An argument that you may hear over the dinner table, but never goes anywhere.

one of the selling points was that it could or would lead to a single-payer system and also provide competition for the private insurance. The CBO now estimates that 10 million people will be enrolled in the public plan in 2019, Howard Dean has put the number lower at 5-10 million.

We are told that the proposed plans will not lead to single-payer by Secretary Sebelius and that the competition will be mild at best, nothing like the original talking points.

:(

This article is from June...

A pseudo-public option ... guess we'll find out

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5878900&mesg_id=5878900

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/06/17/sebelius-flat-out-never-single-payer/

"...The proposal to provide a government-run Medicare-like program as an option for purchase within an insurance exchange of private health plans is vehemently opposed by the insurance industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AMA, all Republicans, a large bloc of conservative Democrats, and many others. No amount of negotiation can resuscitate a Medicare-like option. It’s dead.

To avoid losing the support of the progressives and many of the moderates in Congress, efforts are being made to create a new private program that has distinguishing features, primarily cosmetic, that will allow them to mislabel it as a public option. The fear of opponents is that this pseudo-public option could later be transformed into a government-run program. Thus it is imperative that the design of the option would lock it up as a private sector model with no possibility of transformation. Without that assurance, the pseudo-public option will have to be eliminated during markup in order to salvage other reform policies. The opponents will never ever sign on to single-payer-in-waiting.

Those in the progressive community who abandoned single payer to support a public Medicare-like option, believing that this was the politically feasible strategy for success, simply haven’t been paying attention if they still really believe that a government-run public option can survive..."

-------

Interviewer: What’s been the hardest thing for you to explain?

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: I think that the whole idea of the public option has been difficult, in part because I think some of the opposition has described it as a potential for a draconian scenario that was never part of the discussion in the first place. So disabusing people of what is not going to happen is often difficult because there is no tangible way to do that.

Interviewer: Can you say flat out it’s just never going to be single-payer health insurance, and we’re going to try to write it, if we can, so that it won’t ever be?

Secretary Sebelius: Oh I think that’s very much the case, and, again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion..."


------

THE HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC OPTION.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2009&base_name=the_history_of_the_public_opti

"...The rest is history. Following Edwards' lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker's policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now's political strategy. It was a real high-wire act -- to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won't be the kind of deal that could "become the dominant player." So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

The alternative history question would be: What if they had pushed for single-payer all along? Could the political process then have sold them out and compromised by supporting the public option we now look likely to lose?"

Thanks

:hi:

It is not available to "The Public", is managed by "The Exchange", provider participation is "optional", and subsidies (Billions) are channeled to the For Profit Health Insurance Industry.
The CBO projects LESS than 10 Million enrolled in "The Public Option" by 2019.

10 Million is laughable.
It is not NEAR enough to "keep the Insurance Companies honest" or "open the door to Single Payer".
In fact, it will close the door to REAL reform for another generation.


REAL Public Option = Publicly Owned, Government Administered alternative thatis open to anyone who wants it. It is allowed to use ALL the advantages of Public Ownership and Government Administration.

to wait and see how it turns out. Personally, I won't blame Obama for whatever bill is sent to him. We've seen how hard this is, what with nuts bringing guns to rallies, even biting a man's finger off. The GOP is courting these assholes and the media is giving them way more credibility than they should.

Both Obama and Congress have to deal with opposition from all sides - RW wackos, the "progressives" and the corporate media and the huge insurance lobby. If anybody thought this would be easy or that we would get everything we wanted they're just naive.

That said, I call and email my reps regularly. And thankfully my Senators are both on board with the public option now. I like to think I made some difference with adding my voice to thousands of others. That's the only way we win.

that would be great, but unfortunately I see no signs that this is reality. :-(

it seems like it would be insane for Obama to cave on it just to garner a few Pub votes that aren't going to matter in the end anyway. I believe that we're up to 49 Senators (Wyden just signed on) and Jane Harman threw her support behind it in the House. If he does inexplicably end up caving on the PO, then I'll be really scratching my head about it.

"55% support the public option, 41% oppose (new CNN poll)"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6448634&mesg_id=6448634

Also it really depends on how the question is phrased.

Which IMHO are suspect in general, anyway. Although, still, if you do *believe* the polls, PO still has 14% more support than opposition. Those numbers may be higher depending on, like you said how you phrase the question and describe the PO. I was actually referring to support for a PO among Democrats in Congress.

the bill is becoming more of a pseudo-public option as posted above.

played at lightspeed. I hope we all don't get blown to bits if no one swerves.

whores will win the day. I hate to be so cynical, but I've lived too long not to be. I hope I am terribly wrong and Obama comes up on the side of the majority of Americans on this. We have been the victims of innuendos, half truths, distortions and out and out lies for so long, that a long drink of positive action and truth would end a very big drought in my mind.

letting Congress hash it all out among themselves. He genuinely wanted a bill handed to him that he could consider....he's not writing the bill, like the Clintons. (I'm SURE that behind the scenes, Rahm let Obama's goals be known, though.)

I think everyone has been caught off guard by the huge groundswell of animosity and angst that the bill has caused. (I'm not...I know how the Repubs are, as do all other DUers.) But I don't think Obama quite knew how bad some of the Repubs can be.

I think he intentionally hung back, to take the temperature of where this was all going, who wanted what and how badly. Who might or might not vote for this or that.

But now it's September, and everyone, including Obama, has hit the ground running on health care. We'll find out soon where the line in the sand is and for whom.

I think that he has mostly been spending these early stages of the HCR debate observing it from a safe distance and periodically floating "trial balloons" out there to see how everybody reacts and especially to see if he can do anything with the Republicans. I think he may even be purposely helping to create a little "angst" among progressives to help him bring this home- in which case he will undoubtedly have to offer something that he knows everybody on our team will fight tooth and nail for. To purposely honk off his base and a lot of other people at this point by announcing a willingness to sign a mediocre watered-down corporate-sponsored bill would be almost unfathomable. I mean, do people really not remember how he won (and won BIG) last year and do they think he's gotten dumber and/or been corrupted that easily? Occam's Razor, people. Occam's Razor.................

As long as it ends the way I want it to.

And we are counting on him. I hope with all my heart you are right, and that we will finally know where the lines have been drawn, because its all been so ambiguous so far. When people are not willing to lay any of their cards out, I start getting suspicious.