Changing The Conversation

I personally am not sure what to make of President Obama and the rest of the administration's messaging on the public option recently. I realize that many people on the left think its a signal that he is willing to drop a public option to get a health care reform bill passed, but I am not sold on that notion. First of all liberals and progressives are always going to be skeptical in a situation like this one, and with good reason. We have been sold out so many times in the past by the Democrats we helped to get elected that we would be fools to take politicians at their word.

But second of all I just really have a hard time believing that he would, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, spend this amount of political capital advocating for and defending the notion of a public option just to drop it. The majority of the fearmongering that goes on from the right is about a "government takeover" of health care. If President Obama dropped his support for a public option or only gave it lukewarm support, he would take at least one line of attack from his critics (though I am sure they would find others). But the fact is even yesterday when he made the statement

" that the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform."

during his townhall in Colorado, for at least 15 minutes before that statement he had gone to great lengths to explain and defend what a public option would look like.

Now don't get me wrong, we set ourselves up for dissappointment when we hold politicians up as if they could never lie or do any wrong. And it is entirely plausible that President Obama will sell us out on the public option just so he can claim "victory" by getting some kind of bill through before the year is out. But I just don't see the advantage of it at all for him. Politically it would be disasterous because the wingnuts will still be pissed off and the liberals and progressives would feel so betrayed that he might just ruin his own prospects f reelection by totally alienating his base.

Not only that but on the policy side of it he will have actually passed a big ass bill that doesn't do much to fix the problems. That might be the most compelling reason why I don't think he will drop the public option. Because if he does then 4 years from now both sides of the political spectrum will be pointing out that health care costs are still rising and millions of people will still be uninsured because poor people still won't be able to afford it. And if this bill adds to the deficit, which it more than likely will without a public option to keep the private insurerers in check, you can cancel Christmas for him being a two term President.

So what is it all about then?

Well this is just my educated guess but I think that President Obama sees the health care reform fight as having hit a messaging wall. At this point there are people on the left and on the right who have focused almost solely on the public option. The problem with that is it obscures the other benefits of the bill. And in doing so, by focusing on a public option which will for the most part only affect the 48 million citizens that are uninsured in this country, we really aren't making the case strongly for people who already have insurance and are happy for the most part of how health care reform will help them.

A lot of people in the midle who are not politics junkies are hearing the debate and probably have not a clue that they too will be helped by health care reform. You hardly ever hear in the cable chatter the caveats about eliminating insurance companies' ability to reject people for preexistinig conditions. You rarely hear about the fact that the health care reform bills will take away life time caps. You almost never hear about how setting up a health care exchange will give people greater choice and also help to bring down their premiums. And you would be hard pressed to hear how the bill will close the so called "donut hole" for senior citizens in the prescription drug plan, a problem that is a lot bigger than most people realize.

When we get people to realize how much is in the bill that will affect them positively then its highly likely that the public option will be palatable to them even if normally they aren't a fan of "big government". So in a roundabout sort of way it may be that getting a public option passed may be better served by not talking up a public option so much and instead reframing the conversation to include ALL of the benefits of the health care reform bill.

Now I might be a sucker here, I will definitely cop to that, but I still believe strongly that we will have a public option in the ultimate bill that gets signed into law. From where I am sitting this appears to be a change in messaging not meant to signal a willingness from the Obama administraton to drop the public option, but an eagerness to try to get public opinion polling back on his side. They have to get a bill out of the Senate Finance Committee then start reconciling all the bills and here is my prediction. I will bet that as soon as the Senate Finance committee votes a bill out of committee, President Obama will come out and say exactly what he wants in the final bill. At that point the horses will be out of the barn and the only thing left will be final votes in the House and in the Senate. So the imperative right now is on getting that bill out.

For now I will choose to keep my powder dry and let the process play itself out. Here is the deal, if we are going to get sold out on this then it has already pretty much been done. For that reason it makes no sense to blow a gasket right now. It will make not a whit of difference in the end anyway and any measure of retribution we might want to seek will take time anyway.. However we have good reason to take a wait and see approach here. For one if we start dumping on the administration in advance of a final bill then we hurt our own cause by driving public opinion down even further. That could lead to some of our more Republican leaning Congressman to hide behind that polling in an effort to vote against that bill. Not only that we end up creating a situation where we caricature ourselves. We end up allowing President Obama to frame us as the "far left" if we refuse to focus on the other aspects of the bill and instead continue to draw a line in the sand about the public option and the public option only.

In conclusion, here is the actual clip of Secretary Sebelius discussing the public option with John King. I really don't think it comes across the way that CNN reported it. But then again it's John King, what do you expect?