I will feel bad for people living in states that opt out of a public insurance option. However it won't help them one bit if people in NO states are given the choice of a public option instead. Understand that I write this as someone who strongly supports establishing a Single Payer, or Medicare for All, public health insurance system in America; NOW. Sure I support that, but I also know that there isn't a prayer of a chance of making that happen, not now.
Call the system unfair, call the game rigged, unless someone has the power to change that system or nullify that game it will be go on being played under the rules in effect. I am not a defeatist, I am a fighter, and mine has been one small voice among many pushing the fight forward in the current session of Congress. I have witnessed our ability to move a mountain, against all seeming insider odds, to keep some form of a public option alive, to expose and reject the false promise of a "trigger to nowhere" being offered us as a sleeping pill instead. Our power is real. And so is the mountain. Our ability to move it slightly helped crack the aura of it's permanent invincibility. But that mountain is still there, pushed a few yards further down the road.
Various outlets (see Quick Hits on the right) are reporting that the White House and/or Nancy Pelosi are moving away from a robust triggerless public option and toward accomodating Olympia Snowe. Others say these stories are a fiction.
Instead of adding to the he said/she said on that I'd like to propose a new kind of trigger and here it is:
If a trigger-based public option passes Congress and is signed into law the entire netroots, or as much as we can corral, withholds all campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Organizing for America for the 2010 and 2012 campaign cycles.
No money to these groups. None for the next 3 years. Instead, we only give money to those leaders or groups we know fought to do the right thing. Open Left does a great job highlighting these Better Democrats and other groups advancing progressive causes.
So this shouldn't be too hard a sell on this site. But should we work to spread this idea throughout the netroots?
It's the jumpy season for health care reform, this end game with a thousand twists and turns. Rumors fly around, meetings happen where things said get misinterpreted. Senators get nervous, groups get nervous, and your friendly neighborhood blogger and consultant gets called sometimes.
All of this is natural to an intense legislative battle, and (some of the time) it's healthy too, because trial balloons get popped or false rumors get discredited. So here's my story: a worried Senator, and a couple of groups working on the health care battle, called me last night to tell me they were extremely nervous that the White House was on the verge cutting a deal with Olmpia Snowe on her trigger-that's-not-a-trigger amendment. That rumor got combined with a story about the White House discouraging a floor fight over the public option, and suddenly a lot of folks were very upset, especially because things were moving fast in the Finance committee.
I wrote a story about what I was hearing this morning, and by the end of the day, it now looks like my sources and I jumped the gun. The White House has denied, on the record to Sam Stein at Huffington Post, they are pressuring anyone on the trigger proposal, and I have been privately been told by very senior White House staffers that my report was wrong.
I am glad to hear that, because this trigger amendment is awful, written on purpose to avoid ever being triggered. But having things like this happen is a very good thing, because it provides some clarity as to what is happening in this debate. I don't think my sources were wrong to be nervous, there is a whole lot of deal cutting going on, and I am glad that the White House responded so clearly and firmly that they are not interested in pressuring anyone to support this rotten trigger idea. We still have a long way to go in this fight, and we don't know what will happen in the end game.
But for the moment, I've never been so pleased to have gotten it wrong.
Susan Collins wants a Trigger. She acknowledges that the Public Option is the best mechanism to fix our broken system of private insurance companies, but then with a straight face she says that the threat alone of fixing the broken system should convince the broken system to become unbroken. The threat should be a few years long.
When the car you're speeding in is about to crash into a wall, it's not the potentiality of a seatbelt that will save you. It's a seatbelt. It's brakes. It's evasive steering. It's a bumper. It's an airbag.
Think about that! The solution should only become available if the problem keeps getting worse for two more years.
In other words: before we fix it, we must first let it get worse. That makes sense.
NOTE: In some of the photos below, crowds waiting are waiting for medical care provided by Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, who have been called upon in America's largest cities to help some of the tens of millions of Americans whose government would let them die.
