The manager's amendment to the House Health Care Reform Bill, H.R. 3962 has been presented and it brings with it the death knell to hopes for single payer health care reform this year.
This is a sad time for all those who have worked hard and struggled to get Obama and other Democrats to support the health reform approach that all know would work best.
It is hard to know how to react.
The definitive end of single payer was declared by Mike Danner of Congressman Conyers' staff:
...Kucinich dead as a doornail. Thanks to all those who tried to get it back in...
My first take was well put by Jonathan Starr whose cynical letter to the Center For Policy Analysis mailing list bemoaned the state of the health reform proposal:
Whoopdedoo.
There is a public option proposed that would not start for several years; which hardly anyone would be able to join; which would be saddled with a long and complicated and expensive process for enrolling provider participants; which would have little negotiating leverage for getting favorable prices and rates; and whose client pool inherently would be biased towards those most expensive to insure.
As such it would have little capacity to keep insurance rates down, even when it finally did get started. It might even have to charge higher premiums than private insurance.
Meanwhile, the bill has been stripped of the Kucinich Amendment to allow states to start their own single-payer programs, which would be real reform. And there has been a bait-and-switch betrayal of Representative Anthony Weiner who, in exchange for his cooperation in committee, was promised a floor discussion and vote on his single-payer amendment, all of which is now being prohibited.
Ellen Shaffer, the co-director of the Center for Policy Analysis, responds with more hope and the level-headed practicality of one who has fought battles, lost, and returned to fight the people's fight again:
We may not solve the health care crisis - a deep, profound and complex one - in 8 months, in the middle of an economic upheaval, after decades in which social movements and progressive organizations have been attacked and eviscerated, and millions have been jolted into poverty and homelessness. That's for starters.
But neither are we entirely at the mercy of forces we don't know and can't influence.
It looks like the Kucinich amendment will not be offered; the Weiner amendment probably will. They may or may not be definitive policy issues in the end, but our activism kept each of these amendments alive, without any doubt.
It is premature to determine what difference if any the public option will make. The fight to keep it alive was not a pretend fight and it isn't over yet. The insurance industry does not want it there and it is there because of us.
There are more than enough reasons to be angry and dismayed but it also helps to analyze the politics of the fight we're in. Pelosi tried to get 218 votes for Medicare + 5%. There are voters in districts where Glenn Beck is a more powerful force than Jon Stewart, and government-run health care is not a popular term.
I think it could make a difference if the President finally starts butting some heads and it will help if he's getting up off his organizers. I do not doubt for a minute that we will want to and have to continue to advocate for a single payer system before during and after that happens. This fight matters and it's still going on.
I'm not sure what to do now, but I know I am not going to give up.