Joan Walsh - Salon.com

Joan Walsh - Salon.com: "I want to ask, respectfully, that liberals who insist Democrats must give up the public option in the health care debate before there's a single vote, please stop telling us they're channelling Teddy Kennedy. I want to call out those liberals – my friend Jonathan Alter; ABC's George Stephanopolous; the not-always-liberal (in his own self-concept) Chris Matthews – and say: Why give up now? Wouldn't Kennedy have continued to fight, at least until he had concrete proof that he couldn't find 60 votes for the public option?"

Exactly. Without a public option, there will be no meaningful reform. We must have a public plan participating in the marketplace, at a minimum. If it is out competed by private options, that's great. If it wins, as I suspect it will, that reveals a lot about how we got to where we are today.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Go Wyden Go!

What If They Passed Single-Payer and Didn't Tell Anyone? - WashingtonPost.com : The Wyden folks quietly slipped in an amendment giving states enormous flexibility to experiment upward. Essentially, states can ask the federal government for a waiver that allows them to keep the federal funds they're receiving and do pretty much anything they want with them, so long as the coverage they provide is "at least as comprehensive as required under the Chairman’s Mark" . . . . If we don't end up with a public option at the federal level, at least have the ability for states to broaden the public participation in the system. The states are often considered, and allowed to be, crucibles of experimentation for policies like this. It's got the potential to do some real good.
Read more

September 6-7 - All that speed: what to do with it?

"The greatest thing in life is to die young - but delay it as long as possible." - George Bernard Shaw Two Cities With Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App   72 Year Old Pamplin Challenges Lewis and Clark Students   Watch Clarkson be a Perv then Race a Hurdler in a Nissan GT-R   Gorgeous Deep Sea Footage of an Unusually Large Dumbo Octopus
Read more