I don't spend that much time listening to news radio. But when I do, it's KNX 1070 here in Los Angeles.
I was driving home last night at around 11 when I heard the hourly CBS evening news report, which comes on at the top of every hour discussing the day's top headlines. This hour, they led with the Senate Finance Committee votes on the public option. You know this story--the 15-8 and 13-10 "no" votes that killed the public option in the Committee.
At first, the report made me really angry. It discussed how Max Baucus said that even though he prefers a public option, he was going to vote against it because it wouldn't pass the Senate. It proceeded to make me even more angry when it said that the lack of a public option in the bill would actually help Obama because it would make passing a bipartisan bill easier.
Ok, so at that point I was a little upset. But then, the bombshell.
More below.
The report concluded with this--transcribed from memory as best as possible.
Supporters of the public option say it's the best way to bring down costs by forcing competition for lower insurance premiums. Opponents say that it will drive out private insurers and lead to a situation where most health care is provided by the government. The ironic thing is that the public option will actually save billions of dollars and make the health care system cheaper, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So opposition to the public option isn't based on cost, it's entirely philosophical.
Yeah. That's an unbiased CBS Evening News radio report.
I just want everyone to imagine any other situation in which a new service was prevented from opening even though it would save people's lives, improve the economy and improve our own personal pocketbooks simply because the minority political party that had been thumped in the last two elections wanted to make sure that the bloated, vampiric institutions that were performing the service previously could keep on making billions of dollars in blood money.
This is the situation we find ourselves in. The mainstream news media can even admit that the Republican Party has completely abandoned the interests of the American people to stand on principle against government involvement, and yet for some reason, those same media are unable to make the next logical step: a simple value judgment on whose outlook, whose philosophy, is more appropriate:
A pragmatic philosophy that says, "what can we do to help the American people?" or a grandstanding philosophy that stands on principle against our own government because the success of a public option might undercut their arguments for free-market fundamentalism?
And how did it even come to this?