Needlenose

After all the brouhaha about the competing interests in the Democratic party, and how the Dems were going to self destruct because they couldn’t agree on such elemental concepts as the public option, it looks like the give-and-take of politics may actually have a positive outcome. In the House, where 60 Democratic members have written a letter to Obama telling him that they can’t vote for a bill without a public option, word is that they’ll get the chance to vote for the bill they want. In the Senate, where, especially with the demise of Ted Kennedy, the trend is towards a “trigger” bill, in which the public option is delayed while the insurance companies have a chance to comply with preset savings and inclusion goals, scuttlebutt is that they’ll get the bill that they want. These bills will then go to conference, where the outcome will be a fairly robust trigger-based bill.

Why is this a good outcome? Well, that depends on whether you believe that the insurance companies have the remotest motivation or desire to actually “use the free marketplace to solve America’s health care challenges”, as the Republicans love to claim. Rather than banging our heads against a “public option now, or nothing” platform with a slim-to-none chance of passage, if we’re smart we can have our cake and eat it too. We can put hoist Republicans on their own petard of free market reform, which we know won’t work, and which they don’t really believe anyway. We can get a public option, albeit a bit later than we’d like, by allowing the triggers to kick in and force the reforms we need. And we can get out from under the mantra that “it’s Dems who are stopping reform”, which has been very effective politically for the Repugs, by using the natural divisions in our party to create a compromise that’s really not a compromise (except in immediacy of implementing the public option).

One of my sincerest hopes is that the Democrats can avoid the self-immolation that the Republicans are living through now, in which the right and far-right factions are tearing the party to shreds.  If we can craft a scenario in which both of our factions, the “public option now” left and the “we can’t afford it with this $9 Trillion deficit” Blue Dog crowd can each vote their conscience, and we can end up, say, five years down the road, with a public option triggered by the insurers inability to control their own greed and ineptitude, and humiliate free-market Republicans in the bargain, someone help me understand why that’s a bad outcome.