Obama's Mistake

Obama's mistake in the health care debate was to not open the discussions up by pushing a single-payer bill out of the White House. So far Obama has been content to give Congress only a bare outline of what he'd like to see in a final bill and let the representatives and senators wrangle over the details. This has been a huge handicap for those of us who favor health care reform. When the teabaggers and industry astroturf people start saying crazy untrue things, the only response that Democratic congresscritters have is to say, "no bill currently proposed has that provision." What does it say, the protesters ask? "Well, there is no it, there are a lot of different bills under consideration, the details are still being worked out in committee etc etc."

It would be a lot easier to be simply for something at this stage, rather than simply for the generic promise of reform. Furthermore, the protesters already call the proposals for reform "Obamacare." Obama hopes to escape the blame/credit for specific provisions in the bill coming from congress, but it's not going to happen. He's the president, so everyone will assume that he approves of any and all portion of any bill he finally signs.

The other issue is single-payer health care. From the rhetoric coming from the teabaggers, we know that they assume they are protesting against single-payer health care. I saw one video where a congressman said to the crowd, "this isn't single-payer!" and the crowd responded in unison with a shout, "we don't believe you!" What does it benefit us to adopt a compromise position (a public option) when the other side assumes that the compromise is in fact single payer in disguise? The discussion needs to be about single-payer, not this mash of weaker proposals.

I've talked about bipartisanship before. Now I think that not only has the bipartisan ship sunk, it's sitting at the bottom of the ocean growing coral. While Senator Grassley was pretending to be working on a bipartisan compromise, he was he now admits only working to delay a bill appearing before the Senate before the August recess. Not only that, but the politicians who are perpetuating the lie about 'death panels' know better. They know that the proposal for end-of-life counseling does not in any sense constitute death panels and in fact they have been on the record in favor of end-of-life counseling in the past.

Obama should send a new bill to the congress and the senate, something that is much shorter than 1000 pages and includes single-payer health care. Once he does that we progressives will have something we can really be for. It isn't too late to reboot this conversation by pushing a new White House bill! In the meantime, all we can do is keep on pointing out the lies and logical fallacies and inconsistencies of the the opposition.