Obama's townhall meeting about health care in VA July 1, 2009.

[Cleita]

I took notes and here is what I understood about it in spite of his careful parsing of terms. He states that single payer health care, although it works in other countries, would create chaos here because it involves a sixth of the economy. Obama chooses his words carefully, but I'm detecting some code here. That sixth of the economy is involved in Wall Street and for some reason he thinks it's important to preserve it for now. Of course that sixth is no doubt the health care, PhRMA and insurance industries, which segues to the public option. He was unambiguous that the public option he favors would be an insurance offered by the government within a medical exchange program. He stops short of saying it would be Medicare but it sounds like it when he proceeds to the financing of it that involves cutting insurance profits on the Medicare Advantage programs (a good idea actually and they should be eliminated from Medicare altogether IMHO) and lifting the cap on the payroll tax that is directly used to finance Social Security and Medicare. So I think he wants to offer Medicare on the public option, but didn't want to say it out loud, but that would be a good thing.

He is very firm in stating that this can't be done unless we push Congress to do it, otherwise the lobbyists will determine the future of our health care. I'm certain with even this big tent approach to health care that he is taking, the private sector will fight hard and dirty to make sure that the money to be allocated for a public option will be redirected to their coffers and we will be stuck with an unworkable system that is worse than what we have now.

[nightrain]

1. and then look and see what Kennedy/Dodd come up with

on 7/2! The HELP committee published Parts 2 and 3 of their "public option" plan. What a joke of a bill!

See http://journals.democraticunderground.com/nightrain

for some details on how this proposal actually preserves the current fragmented private insurance way of providing healthcare and mandates private insurance by employers (financial windfall for insurance corporations). Basically the only people who get in to this "public option" are those currently without coverage.