Morning Bell: How The Public Option Became The Core Of Obamacare

Conn Carroll / August 19, 2009

In their front page story “Debate’s Path Caught Obama by Surprise: Public Option Wasn’t Intended as Major Focus”, The Washington Post reports that the White House was “unprepared for the intraparty rift” that occurred after the Obama administration seemed to back away from the public option this past weekend. The Post goes on to quote a senior White House adviser: “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform. It’s a mystifying thing.” If this “senior White House adviser” is speaking the truth, and the Obama administration had no idea that the public option was the whole point of Obamacare for the base of the Democratic party, then “unprepared” is too kind a description for the White House’s recent failings on health reform.

As executive editor of the liberal American Prospect Mark Schmitt details, from the very beginning “the public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort to put all the pieces in place for health reform before the 2008 election.” Schmitt then quotes a November 2007 speech from Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future:

The hard reality, from the point of view of all of us who understand the efficiency and simplicity of a single-payer system, is that our pollsters unanimously tell us that large numbers of Americans are not willing to give up the good private insurance they now have in order to be put into one big health plan run by the government. (more…)