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Seven Months, Seven Excuses
That would be one excuse a month, each one different, given by Sen. Joe Lieberman for opposing the public option. Steve Benen has been keeping a record:
Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve been keeping track of Joe Lieberman’s evolving rationales for opposing a public option. The Connecticut senator is so opposed to letting some consumers choose between competing public and private plans that he’s willing to kill the entire bill over this one issue, but his reasoning keeps changing.
Believe it or not, we’re up to seven arguments over seven months, none of which makes sense.
Steve goes through all of them, but the latest is that the public option is a Trojan horse for single-payer:
“I started to ask some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, privately, and two of them said ‘some in our caucus, and some outside in interest groups, after the president won such a great victory and there were more Democrats in the Senate and the House, said this is the moment to go for single payer.’” So, I joke, the senator is, in fact, as big a “conspiracy theorist” as me. He laughingly rejoins: “But I have evidence!”
This really is incoherent. First, independent analyses, including reports from the CBO, have found that public and private plans can compete and co-exist without driving the other out of business. Lieberman may claim to have imaginary “evidence,” but there is no conspiracy.
Second, this wasn’t sprung on lawmakers after the election; it was part of all of the major Democratic candidates’ plans as far back as mid-2007.
And third, if progressive lawmakers decided this is “the moment to go for single payer,” they would have proposed single payer. As it stands, they’re pushing for a watered-down public option with a state opt-out.
Lieberman’s “conspiracy theory,” in other words, is bunk.
6 Responses to “Seven Months, Seven Excuses”
I'd like a list of reasons why we are still listening to this guy.
Good for Joe Lieberman, moderate.
As for lists, I'd like a list of reasons why Progressives haven't formed their own private insurance companies with THEIR OWN money and run them as they would like insurance companies to be run. No one is stopping them but their own tight-fistedness. The excuses should be amusing.
I can't stand Joe Lieberman. I believe he is a political opportunist of the worst sort. (Who else could run for Vice President with Al Gore and then eight years later try to whore his way into the same office with the opposition party? Moderate? Spare me… he's a power slut.)
Also, I am in favor of the public option — but just barely and am worried as hell about it.
Having said that (and let the flames fly!), any and all Democrats are free to support or reject the public option in representing their constituents and following their own conscience. Else Democrats are the same narrow ideologues they accuse the right wing Republicans of being. Mandatory support for government run health insurance is not the Democratic party I support, Ms. Kattenburg. The public option does not have any where near unanimous support in our party and may not even have the super majority support needed to end debate in the Senate. If not, so be it. The liberal wing is unwisely using the public option as a purity litmus test. Joe Lieberman is an opportunist — not a moderate. But moderates are clearly the swing voters on this issue… and liberals alienate them at their own peril.
Leo, you're onto something, in more ways than one.
Kathy wrote: “one excuse a month, each one different” –
Well, Kathy, [grin] how many insurers are in Hartford?
It's hard to understand what happened to Joe Lieberman. Whatever he was, his decision to run for both the Senate and the Vice Presidency demonstrated a triumph of opportunism over ethics.
Poor Leonidas,
Just doesn't seem to get the fundamental idea that we're all in this together. Some of us are young and healthy. Some of us are old and sick. Eventually, it's quite likely that all of us will get sick or be hurt in an accident. That's the idea. You pay when you're healthy, you pay when you're sick. You pay one way or another. If we pool our assets, we're all better off. And, there's no reason in the world why those who can afford it can't buy all the extra insurance they want.
Everyone gets health care. If we continue the most expensive and least effective health care system in the industrial world, those without insurance, 75% of whom are working people, will get the most expensive form of health care, the Emergency Room. The alternative is something most people with a basic sense of morality loathe; letting them die.
Those health care systems which insure everyone, whether private or public systems, are the most effective, efficient and moral. Unless everyone's in, anything else fails. Every reasonable statistic I've seen, from cost per person to infant mortality, demonstrates that the “system” in this country is an abject failure.
But, why let facts get in the way?
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