Conservatives should back Obamacare

The health care individual mandate to cure the "free rider" economic problem, and pro-market health exchanges were both Republican ideas supported by Republicans in Congress... until Obama proposed them.  Then suddenly these ideas became Big Gubument Socialism.

Obamacare is hated by Republicans today mainly for things it doesn't include -- like death panels, and mandated coverage of abortions.  But they also focus to their detriment on contraceptive coverage that most women, Repub and Dem alike, want covered by private insurance.  Meanwhile, true liberals like moi don't like Obamacare because it's not a single-payer system, and there is no public option (aka "Medicare for all") to provide real competition with private insurance and show which would provide the best outcomes for the lowest price.

Concludes Kleinke:

The real problem with the health care plan — for Mr. Romney and the Republicans in general — is that political credit for it goes to Mr. Obama. Now, Mr. Romney is in a terrible fix trying to spin his way out of this paradox and tear down something he knows is right — something for which he ought to be taking great political credit of his own.

The Conservative Case for Obamacare

By J.D. Kleinke

September 29, 2012 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/why-obamacare-is-a-conservatives-dream.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Obama owes liberals an explanation -- and an apology

A little grayer, but any wiser after 4 years of giving in to the GOP?

Conservatives dislike Obama for their own silly reasons, most of which relate to his non-traditional background: his mixed race; his peripatetic, multi-cultural, international upbringing (encapsulated in Birtherism); his "inexplicable" entrance into and completion of Columbia University and Harvard Law School; his "angry black" former pastor; his community organizing in Chicago; his proximity to ACORN and Saul Alinsky, etc.  

Indeed, it's quite telling how, even after four years in office, conservatives still primarily fixate on, and object to, Obama's origins, i.e. everything leading up to his term as Senator from Illinois.  It just goes to show that they were never going to accept him, never going to admit him into their country club, no matter what he did.  

Prime example: when Obama rolled out a health care bill after months of consultation with private insurance companies and Big Pharma -- a bill that was originally conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation, passed into law by Republican Mitt Romney in 2006, and endorsed by Republican Newt Gingrich in 2006 and again 2008 -- because it came from Obama, Republicans called it Socialism and Big Government tyranny.  (And today, the aforementioned three feel not the slightest bit of shame in criticizing it as such!)

Unlike conservatives, we liberal-progressives have real gripes with Obama.  Unlike them, we are entitled to feel baffled and betrayed at Obama's first four years, because we voted for him with hope for change, and then watched as he let himself get beat up, again and again, by the Republican Congress, while he gave up key concessions for nothing, including: 

• the public option in Obamacare; 
• a stimulus bill in excess of $1.2 billion that was not one-third tax cuts; 
• real mortgage modifications with principal reduction for millions of underwater homeowners; 
• letting Bush's irresponsible tax cuts expire; and
• real banking-financial reform to end Too Big To Fail and speculation with taxpayers' guarantee.

This is not to mention Obama's erstwhile support for fast U.S. troops withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps the most mobilizing issue among Obama's grassroots supporters.  (By the way, during Clint Eastwood's curious, rambling speech at the GOP convention when he called for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, the conservative crowd erupted in cheers.  Gee, what a difference four years and a Democratic commander-in-chief makes!)

This past weekend, Sam Stein and Ryan Grim posted a very good synopsis of the disappointments of Obama's first term from a progressive's point of view.  It shows how Obama foolishly tried to play an "inside game" with Congressional Republicans who stated publicly that their #1 priority was to defeat him in 2012, and who sabotaged a deal with Obama on the deficit because it would have helped him get re-elected.

His pointless concessions were even more tragic and stupid, considering Obama's record 13 million e-mail addresses and 3 million individual online donors in 2008. Obama had this huge mass of active grassroots support with which he could have bludgeoned obstinate Republicans into submission, but instead Obama forswore his base, laying down his greatest weapon only to be barraged by Republican fusillades.

Maybe he's just too nice a guy.  Certainly he's too weak.  Maybe he had bad advice. (OK, he definitely had bad advice: Summers, Geithner, Emanuel, Axelrod, et al.)  Or maybe he was vain and bought into the hype that he was a "transformational" leader whom Republicans would have no choice but to bargain with, thanks to his irresistible post-partisan reasonableness.  Whatever the reason, it was such a wasted opportunity.

Obama Owes Us An Explanation

By Peter S. Goodman

September 3, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/barack-obama-economy_b_1847149.html

Poll: U.S. majority favors public option

I knew the tide had turned when Bill O'Reilly came out in favor of a public option.

But this is it. This is how we get it done: through the states. Even 56% of Republicans favors a public option if it's provided by the states. Apparently they opposed the public option soley because of their pathological, irrational fear of all things federal, but whatever, let's do it.

Kucinich has a state public-option amendment in the House, and Sanders has one in the Senate.


Public option gains support
By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
October 20, 2009 Washington Post

[...]

57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.

WH adviser: Obama 'not demanding' public option

Maybe I misspoke earlier. Obama is leading. He is leading us into the arms of the Republicans and the insurance and Big Pharma lobbyists. He is consciously deciding not to push single-payer or a public option, the only true ways to bring down costs.

What a disgusting sellout coward.

Jarrett: Obama not "demanding" public option

By Carrie Budoff Brown

October 18, 2009 | Politico

URL: http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/1009/Jarrett_Obama_not_demanding_public_option.html

Krugman: Insurance industry's overreach helps reform?

A Hatchet Job So Bad It's Good

By Paul Krugman

October 15, 2009 | New York Times

[....]

As I said, the individual mandate probably should be stronger than it is in the Finance Committee's bill. But there's a reason the mandate was weakened: fear that too many people would balk at the cost of insurance, even with the subsidies provided to lower-income individuals and families. So why not address that cost?

Aside from making the subsidies larger, which they should be, there are at least two changes to the legislation that would help limit costs. First, health exchanges — special, regulated markets in which individuals and small businesses can buy insurance — can be made stronger, in effect giving small buyers a better bargaining position. Second, the public option — missing from the Finance Committee's bill — can be brought back in, giving private insurers some real competition.

The insurance industry won't like these changes, but that matters less than it did a week ago.

There's also another point, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stressed. Part of the opposition to a strong individual mandate comes from the sense that Americans will be forced to buy policies from a greedy insurance industry. Giving people, literally, another option — the right to buy into a public plan instead — would defuse that opposition.

[Indeed, BaucusCare, if passed by Congress as is, would be a corporate socialist giveaway to the insurance industry by mandating that every American buy private health insurance or else pay a tax penalty. -J]

Even with stronger exchanges and a public option, health reform would probably increase, not reduce, insurance industry profits. But the insurers wanted it all. The good news is that by overreaching, they may have ensured that they won't get it.

Free-market case for public option

I've said all this before but if you want to hear it again from a non-partisan MSM source, by all means.

A Free-Market Case for the Public Option

By Max Fisher

October 11, 2009 | The Atlantic

Free-market conservatives and libertarians have made the case that sweeping health care reform, especially the inclusion of a government-run health insurance option, would undermine the free-market for health insurance. They rightly say that, without a free market, there are little or no incentives for promoting innovation or efficiency. The great thing about our system is that the more companies compete for our business, the more they must produce a better product at lower cost, and so on. But this is a fallacy because the health insurance industry is not a free market right now.

Something like televisions exist in a free market because consumers, if they don't like any of the new TVs on the market, can simply keep their old one. If they really don't like the market, they can even forgo owning one altogether; it will make you unpopular on game day, but it won't risk your life. Insurance is different. Anyone with a sense of basic self-preservation has no choice but to buy health insurance every single month. You cannot opt out, there are few options to choose from, and it's difficult to know how to price your future risk of injury. So health insurance companies have distorted incentives to innovate or provide a more cost-effective product.

A public option would, crazy as it might sound, make health insurance a free market. If there exists a government-run plan, which by all accounts would be basic and geared towards affordability, consumers will have the ability to opt out of the private insurance market. Private providers would finally have real incentives to provide a better product and innovate by building an insurance plan stronger than public insurance. Fears that a public option might decree certain treatments "not cost-effective," which are not as outlandish as some liberals think, should delight free-market conservatives because it would be an opportunity for private insurers to step in. Worried you might develop a condition requiring $60,000 medication that no public option would ever include? Buy a blinged-out private plan that, for an increased premium, will.

The hurrahs over last week's CBO score make this even more important. The deficit-positive badge on Baucus's plan makes it all the more likely that his version of reform will be similar to the final product, which means greatly enhanced coverage, through a weak but present mandate and other provisions, but no public option. In short, it means 29 million more people will buy private health insurance, which is great for them. But with insurers getting millions of guaranteed customers without having to improve their product, the incentives for innovation go way down. The already unfree health insurance market would become even less free.

Senate Dems stab Americans in the back, as expected

Big surprise: 3 small-state Democratic Senators on the Finance Committee sided with the insurance lobby and voted down a voluntary public option for health insurance. The amendment lost 10-13, instead of passing 13-10 along party lines.

So forget your stupid fear of "socialized" medicine, government won't even have a role to play outside of Medicare! The draft bill in committee has no way to significantly bring down health costs, since single-payer never had a prayer, and since the public option is officially dead.

This post-vote statement by Senator Thomas "Traitor" Carper (D-DE) goes down as one of the dumbest ever:

"Carper said he did not vote for the [public option] amendment because 'it would give the government an unfair advantage in the marketplace by allowing it to negotiate prices initially based on Medicare. That would stifle competition, not increase it, and the end result, I believe, would not be good for the consumer.'"

In other words, if the government can use its negotiating leverage to get us, the American people, better prices for medical care than the private sector can, then that is unfair to the private sector.

Now we know whose side the Senate Millionaires Club is on. (Hint: not ours).

Senate Finance Committee Votes Against Including Public Option In Reform Bill

By Kris Alingod

September 30, 2009 | All Headline News

URL: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7016551229