The incarnation of the public option in the Senate does not have the votes to pass. The final bill before the Senate will be filibustered, and the committee version will be filibustered, if it ever gets through. Myself, I would put money on November 3’s outcomes letting Democrats know there will be no political cover for their votes on this gross overreaching of government power. BUT! The Democrats have slowly abandoned the radical proposals of their Leftist base and have come around to a moderate proposal that Bob Dole put forth in 1993.
Congrats Dems. You finally caught up! The government-run public option the Dems finally put forth, where individuals can purchase insurance from an entity that negotiates evenly with all other insurance providers, will likely be an OPT-IN program. Meaning, your state will have to take the affirmative step of entering the program. Your state and local politicians will then be responsible for the results, such as the public option failing to pay for itself, paying for the resulting deficits, dealing with citizens who wait until they get sick to get insurance, and explaining to voters why lines for doctors accepting public option payments are longer than waiting at the DMV.
Like I’ve always said, “you want to join a collective solution, knock yourself out. Just give me the right to ignore you. If your plan won’t work unless you make everybody join, that’s why it will fail.”
“The Democrats have slowly abandoned the radical proposals of their Leftist base and have come around to a moderate proposal that Bob Dole put forth in 1993.”
What you failed to understand, from the beginning, is that some weak-kneed compromise on the public option was virtually inevitable. That’s because you fail to understand just how toxic is the intersection between government and corporate interests. In the end, corporations get much of what they want.
On top of all that, this exposes just how ludicrous was all the alarmist, “government takeover”, socialist BS emanating from the right. A government takeover would have been single-payer. That was NEVER on the table. And now a robust public option is apparently not even on the table.
Could you have been MORE wrong?