The health care follies continue

Just the other day, I noted that two liberal blogs are mobilizing to try to save the public option in the health care reform bill.

Unfortunately, the public plan they are trying to save may be only a shadow of its former self, according to Physicians for a National Health Care Plan.

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.

Of course, you might expect PHNP to have strong criticism for the public option, given that they are one of the primary groups pushing for a single-payer national health plan. But over at Common Dreams, Jeff Cohen has an interesting post that makes pretty much the same point.

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option – to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn’t dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in healthcare.

Meanwhile, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write that as Congressional Republicans and right-wing activists hope to use the health care issue to crush the effectiveness of the Obama's administration, the Obama health care proposal has become more and more watered down:

Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Their story describes "a string of victories" plucked from the Senate Finance Committee by drug company lobbyists, including no cost-cutting steps, no cheaper drugs to be allowed across the border from Canada, and no direct Federal government negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices.

I wish I had a brilliant concluding sentence to tie all this together, along with a clear and shining strategy to bring some kind of reasonable conclusion to this mess. If I think of anything, I'll keep you posted.