By choosing the public option — not single payer — as the left-most negotiating point, Democrats left themselves with few places to go but toward more conservative proposals for insurance reform, experts say, including the co-op model and a system of triggering public plans only if private insurers fail to meet certain cost and coverage targets. In the blood sport of congressional negotiating — which dictates that you over-ask, and then move toward your goal during the subsequent bartering — Democrats were asking merely for the public plan they wanted in the final bill. The move, some experts say, provided Republicans with greater leverage to fight the public option. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a lead negotiator for the Finance proposal, has said bluntly that a public plan can’t pass the Senate. Even Obama, in a speech on Capitol Hill last week, walked back his support for the proposal by not insisting that it be included in the final reform bill.
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Young, who practiced medicine for 61 years before joining Physicians for a National Health Program in 2007, said his group sides squarely with the 10 percent. The public plan wouldn’t accomplish the Democrats’ coverage and cost-containment goals, he said, because it would leave in place the private insurers who “account for virtually all the problems we’re confronting.”
“It’s funny that both the conservative critics and the liberal supporters [of the public option] argue that it’s a stepping stone [to single payer],” he said. “We don’t believe it.”
The entire story, a great read, is largely in between those two passages.
Tom Tomorrow's strip nails another one.
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