I've just finished reading the detailed analysis of the health care bills currently wending their way through Congress. I've also read Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article "Sick and Wrong."
Chances are, you have been unlucky enough at some point to have heard someone use the expression, "It is what it is." Whenever I hear this annoying catchphrase, I always think to myself, how could "it" NOT be what it is? Has it ever happened that something was what it wasn't?
Now it looks as if the "public option" as currently defined in the pending legislative drafts in Congress may qualify as an example of loopy terminological non-identity.
As President Obama has said, one essential goal of reform is to introduce competition into the health insurance industry, which in many markets enjoys near or total monopoly conditions. (Note: this way of thinking about reform already accepts that single-payer is off the table, but let's continue.) However, the legislative draft before Congress disqualifies anyone currently insured from joining the public plan. How will such a plan keep insurance companies honest, if they know that once they have you, you can't jump to the public plan? How can a non-competitive "public option" help to control costs? And yet we would have to wait four years for even this watered-down "public option" to take effect.
It seemed to me that in the past few weeks progressives had finally found a cause from which we would not be moved. The public option. And now it looks like the ground has disappeared from under our feet. Are we still going to fight for the public option when it has become a parody of what it was supposed to be? What a mess.
I hope that before this fight is over, health care reform will be health care reform.
But right now, it is what it isn't.