Here's an interesting catch in the current intra-party debate over whether or not the health insurance reform bill is still worth passing. Check out what Digby notes:
Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.
Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good.
This is, of course, quite true. To sell a bill that imposes a federal mandate on you, individually, to buy insurance from a private provider doesn't "expand coverage," it expands tax penalties. So yes, it's a stretch to say things like what Greg Sargent noted the President had said:
Obama recently told supporters that "the bill you least like" would "provide 29 million Americans health care."
Indeed, if it were Mary Landrieu making Digby's objection, she would doubtless grouse that people will think it's free.
LANDRIEU: I think when people hear "public option" they hear "free health care." Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don’t have to pay for. The problem is, is that we in governments and business have to pick up the tab and as individuals. So I’m not at all surprised that the public option’s been sold as free health care. But there is no free lunch.
What do we think people hear when they hear that this bill, would "provide 29 million Americans health care"?
Why not a bill that would "provide 29 million American families with a home of their own" ... provided they buy themselves one?
That, or course, would be ridiculous. But let's add just a little more ridiculousness. What if we "provided" millions of American families with homes of their own... provided they buy themselves one... or else face a penalty under federal law?
See? From ridiculous to sublime!