Huffington Post's headline is a little more to the point than the Wall Street Journal article, from which it's bulletin is taken.
WHITE HOUSE MAY CAVE ON PUBLIC OPTION
UPDATE: It would be disengenuous to not include a link to this from Politico which was posted at 10:15 this morning:
"I am pleased by the progress we're making on health care reform and still believe, as I've said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest. I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals."
h/t to Realityworld and Askew
WSJ is a little more measured. That headline just suggests another truth, that dealing and bi partisan ship are more important than what we were promised.
But the back breaking straw of the whole story is the direct quote from COS Rahm Emanuel:
"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable.
See, the problem is that keeping a pack of lying theives "honest" is not what we were promised. That's not even possible, and we would have never asked for it. It would be like asking the government to stop credit card companies from charging interest. It's not even rational. Insurance companies are designed to promise you something, and then figure out legal ways to break their promise. It's how they make money. Keeping them honest isn't what we asked for. It's not what this was ever about. This was about providing Quality Health Care to every living man, woman and child that was an American Citizen. Because Health Care is not a luxury, it's a right. Or so we were told during The Promising Time - when votes are sought; when people want you to come in to their store and sample their goods and make a promise to come back again, and they tell you whatever you want to hear.
It's partly our fault for getting so ahead of ourselves and thinking it was actually going to happen. Just because everyone from Barney Frank, to Chris Dodd, to Nancy Pelosi, to Chuck Schumer, to Hillary Clinton,to Barack Obama could be heard from podium to podium telling us that "Health Care Is A Right" ... didn't necessarily mean that they believed it enough to actually demand it once we gave them our votes.
So we did ... and now, the WHITE HOUSE MAY CAVE ON PUBLIC OPTION
Is it because the goal changed? Or is it because that was never the goal in the first place.
Now the goal is to "keep insurance companies honest". To make them drop their prices, I guess, is what it comes down to. So there will still be an enormous swath of ordinary Americans who are destitute, or choosing between the grocery tab and mom's BP meds, for whom Quality Health Care is a Right ... but who will still not be receiving it unless they belly up and pay for it, unlike how it is in virtually every other industrialized country on the planet.
We must have just had different goals. Silly me. Maybe next time around, when the Campaign Circus Wagons come around barking out the next semester of store front promises, someone will actually mean it.
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