Standing Eagle Flying High
Posted on October 24th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Give him his due: Longtime commenter Standing Eagle chastised me a few weeks back for denigrating the likelihood of a public option being part of Obama’s health care bill.
Now WashPo reports that the public option seems increasingly likely….
2 Responses
10/26/2009 12:33 pm
Big announcement today at 3:15. Looks as if Reid will announce that the bill coming before the Senate WILL have the public option — an outcome that surprised the White House at the end of last week. Obama seems to have been planning to have this fight in the conference committee, but he has already won, even before fully engaging! (What will he do with the leftover political capital, one wonders?)
Reid’s innovation seems to have been the idea of allowing states to opt out of the public option — a singularly pointless provision that no state will exercise, but it seems to satisfy jokers like Kent Conrad and Blanche Lincoln, who need some kind of cover so they can claim their state can protect itself from socialism if it wants.
Now nothing can stop the eventual entry of the US government into its rightful place as the health-insurer of last resort, except the willingness of a Democrat to join a Republican filibuster and actually vote to refuse to close debate on his own party’s bill. Extremely difficult to imagine. Now we just need to keep Sen. Lincoln, Sen. Bayh, Sen. Baucus, Sen. Lieberman, and Sen. Landrieu the hell AWAY from each other. There’s your dangerous new Gang of Six. They should be tied up and gagged in the cloakroom until the vote. And Sen. Byrd needs lots of teddy bears and flowers in his hospice room. Hang in there, buddy —
Huge good news!
Worth noting on this historic occasion that Paul Krugman argued pretty persuasively that we would have had many more nationalized health-insurance measures during the 60s, like most civilized countries, if not for racism. The prospect of desegregating hospitals killed the idea for Southern senators.
Huge victory for this outstanding President!
SE
10/26/2009 12:34 pm
Theda, are you out there? What do you think?