I have the terrible feeling that President Obama has found a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory as regards health care reform.<\/p>\n
After a few weeks of members of his administration floating balloons in the media that the public option isn’t a requirement, Obama has asked the Congressional Progressive Caucus how far they’re willing to bend on the public option<\/a>. For instance, the triggered public option might not even achieve anything<\/i><\/a>; depending on how the trigger was written<\/a>, the trigger might never be triggered, or it might make the health care problems worse<\/i>.<\/p>\n What this feels to me is like a movement to pass a<\/i> bill, not a good<\/i> bill, just to check this off — Health reform, check — even if it doesn’t actually<\/i> reform anything<\/i>. What this also<\/i> feels like is that Obama isn’t invested in the issue<\/i>; I don’t see a willingness to spend his political capital to make it happen at a time when it might’ve made more of an impact.<\/p>\n I respect the Obama’s need for consensus and bipartisanship. But when Obama is triangulating against factions of his own party<\/a>, while leaving his flank open on the right, I wonder if he’s going to end up with anything at all in terms of fixing the problems of health care. I fear that, despite the stars being in alignment for it, we’re going to end up with a repeat of the defeat of the Clinton health plan fifteen years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have the terrible feeling that President Obama has found a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory as regards health care reform. After a few weeks of members of his administration floating balloons in the media that the public option isn’t a requirement, Obama has asked the Congressional Progressive Caucus how farContinue reading “On Health Care Musings”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}