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Maybe it's better this way
Dec. 17th, 2009 06:48 pmLike many I was frothing at the mouth with fury at Joe Lieberman for blocking both the public option and the proposed Medicare expansion in the Senate's health reform bill. It was obscene, what he did: for decades he's had his face in the public trough and his ass on government-insurance paid exam tables, and now he wants to deprive us civilians of the coverage he's enjoyed all that time.
But as the saying goes, not everyone who shits on you is your enemy. Look at what the public option was after the insurance industry's whores in both houses got finished with it: as far from what we really wanted, single-payer health coverage, as a shopping cart is from a freight train. When you need a freight train and let yourself get talked down to a pickup truck, a wheelbarrow, and finally a shopping cart, you haven't compromised, you've lost, and there's no point in taking the shopping cart and trying to move freight with it. As others have pointed out, the public option when last seen was a plan that could attract only the indigent and uninsurable; it would have been a money pit, a case in point of the government's inability to do anything without screwing it up, an inexhaustible source of sound bytes for the 2010 and 2012 Republican campaigns.
It's a shame we're not going to have the kind of public health coverage you see in civilized countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and France; but in losing the public optionTM maybe we've dodged a bullet.
But as the saying goes, not everyone who shits on you is your enemy. Look at what the public option was after the insurance industry's whores in both houses got finished with it: as far from what we really wanted, single-payer health coverage, as a shopping cart is from a freight train. When you need a freight train and let yourself get talked down to a pickup truck, a wheelbarrow, and finally a shopping cart, you haven't compromised, you've lost, and there's no point in taking the shopping cart and trying to move freight with it. As others have pointed out, the public option when last seen was a plan that could attract only the indigent and uninsurable; it would have been a money pit, a case in point of the government's inability to do anything without screwing it up, an inexhaustible source of sound bytes for the 2010 and 2012 Republican campaigns.
It's a shame we're not going to have the kind of public health coverage you see in civilized countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and France; but in losing the public optionTM maybe we've dodged a bullet.
