Public Option Contentious Issue

As I wrote about over the past few days, high-level Democrats are issuing signals that the “public option” may need to be abandoned. They are doing this because of intense public pressure being brought to bear on Congressmen home for the August recess. They desperately want to reduce criticisms of the bills so they have a chance of passing something… anything.

The problem is that this effort isn’t working… but don’t blame opponents this time. THIS time it’s the extreme liberals who are complaining about the “public option” being removed from the table. They want it, and by gum they’re gonna push for it!

"You really can't do health reform" without allowing the government to compete with private insurers, said Howard Dean, a former Democratic Party chairman. "Let's not say we're doing health reform without a public option," he added in a slap at the administration's latest move.

The problem is that the centrist Democrat Congressmen won’t accept what the extreme liberals want, and vice versa.

In the House, where Democrats hold a 256-178 majority, passage of legislation will hinge on the ability of the administration and Democratic leaders to satisfy liberals who favor a robust government option and centrists who prefer the co-op approach.

Most Republicans aren’t going to support any government-controlled “reform” that costs additional trillions of dollars, so they have to get the votes from within the Democrat majority. And it is looking very much like finding some proposal that enough Democrats can agree to will be impossible.

One of the Blue Dogs actually said that we should scrap the current bills and start over, this time opening up the process to someone besides the radical liberals who controlled it the first time.

When a questioner, Ray Evans, said he believed the President wants to do too much at once and asked whether Boyd would "be willing to scrap everything" and start over to do pursue reform more incrementally, the congressman responded: "I think that is an excellent idea … we may end up there."

In a later interview with CNN, he said the idea had been been floated with the congressional leadership. He said that with the strong emotions and heated opposition he is seeing, the idea of doing health reform in a more piecemeal fashion is something he is strongly considering.

I agree that the current bills should be abandoned, but I ALSO believe that the Democrat majority needs to be more open to ideas outside their radical, left-leaning universe. The extreme liberal plan is failing because it’s a bad one and American citizens realize that. We need to start again from a different perspective.

The Democrats took the majority because they found centrist candidates who won during the last two elections. Now this is coming back to bite them, and the dynamics between the extreme liberal wing and the more conservative wing may actually prevent them from passing any bill at all.

And that would be a good thing. In this case, passing no bill at all would be better than passing any of the ones I’ve seen.

UPDATE: House Democrats have warned that a plan without a government option will not pass the House.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26203.html