Did President Obama Deal Away the Public Option?

Dear Friends,

I have been sad lately as I have watched President Obama campaign for health care reform, not because I don't think he should be doing it, I do, but because it makes it so clear that he made a terrible error in the way he approached health care reform.  We could have had a much better bill, if he would have consistently campaigned for it with the American people.  He could have stayed true to his campaign promises and had the American public force Congress to enact a great bill despite all the corporate money trying to kill the bill.

The other reason that I have been sad is that it appears that my worst fears about why there is no public option are being realized.  A friend sent me a post by Miles Mogulescu at the Huffington Post entitled, "NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option" (here).  Mr. Mogulescu has been calling attention to this alleged deal since last fall, but it has gained new credibility lately.

On August 12, 2009, The New York Times in an article by David Kirkpatrick (here) reported:

Hospital industry lobbyists, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House, say they negotiated their $155 billion in concessions with Mr. Baucus and the administration in tandem. House staff members were present, including for at least one White House meeting, but their role was peripheral, the lobbyists said.
Several hospital lobbyists involved in the White House deals said it was understood as a condition of their support that the final legislation would not include a government-run health plan paying Medicare rates — generally 80 percent of private sector rates — or controlled by the secretary of health and human services.
“We have an agreement with the White House that I’m very confident will be seen all the way through conference,” one of the industry lobbyists, Chip Kahn, director of the Federation of American Hospitals, told a Capitol Hill newsletter.

In Mr. Mogulescu's post cited above, he bemoans the fact that no major media outlets are picking up this story.  He then writes:

Hopefully, that's changing. On Monday, Ed Shultz interviewed New York Times Washington reporter David Kirkpatrick on his MSNBC TV show, and Kirkpatrick confirmed the existence of the deal. Shultz quoted Chip Kahn, chief lobbyist for the for-profit hospital industry on Kahn's confidence that the White House would honor the no public option deal, and Kirkpatrick responded:

"That's a lobbyist for the hospital industry and he's talking about the hospital industry's specific deal with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee and, yeah, I think the hospital industry's got a deal here. There really were only two deals, meaning quid pro quo handshake deals on both sides, one with the hospitals and the other with the drug industry. And I think what you're interested in is that in the background of these deals was the presumption, shared on behalf of the lobbyists on the one side and the White House on the other, that the public option was not going to be in the final product."

Kirkpatrick also acknowledged that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina had confirmed the existence of the deal to him.

In my post on March 13th, I indicated that I did not understand why the public option was not being included in the reconciliation bill.  I posited some potential reasons.  The first one was that somebody in the Democratic leadership had cut a deal to keep the public option out.  If the reporting by The New York Times is correct, then I have my answer, but what a terrible answer it is.  Candidate Obama campaigned for a public option and while as President Obama, his support for the public option was lukewarm, he did claim to support the public option.  I am trying to find a nicer word than lie for what President Obama did if this reporting is correct.

At the end of Mr. Mogulescu's post cited above, he discusses why he and other liberals should challenge President Obama.  I was going to just give you part of his discussion but it is very good, and so here is the entire comment:

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: Whenever I write blogs which are critical of Obama and Congressional Democrats for making corporatist deals, I get numerous comments from people who believe they are progressive but say they will never vote for Obama or Democrats again, that they will stay home at the next election, or that they will vote for small third parties who have no chance of winning. It's not my intent to encourage those views. Do people making these comments really think bringing Republicans back to power would make things better?
My goal is to shine a light on these backroom deals in order to embarrass Obama and Congressional Democrats to put the interests of the voters over the interests of special interests so that Republicans can't play at being faux populists and use that to take back Congress in order to enact even worse corporatist policies.
Progressives need to have a sophisticated and nuanced relationship with elected Democrats. After the 2008 elections, too many progressive organizations demobilized believing their job was simply to take orders from the White House to support Obama's agenda, whatever it was. That was a mistake. It's equally a mistake for progressives to overreact in the opposite direction and think they can abandon electoral politics and do nothing to prevent the Republicans from regaining power. What's needed is a powerful grassroots progressive movement to force elected officials to do the right thing more often and to counter-balance the power of big money in politics. The periods of progressive change in American politics, like the Progressive Era, The New Deal, and the Great Society, have come when strong progressive movements have forced elites and elected officials to enact somewhat progressive legislation.
Back in June, 2008, I wrote a blog entitled "Obama Will Break Our Hearts--But Progressives Need to Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time" in which I argued that progressives needed to both elect Obama and create a strong grassroots movement or pressure him.
More recently, I wrote a blog entitled "The Democrats' Authoritarian Health 'Reform' Bill and the Ascendency of Corporatism in the Democratic Party" in which I critiqued Obama's Clintonian New Democratic corporatist ideology of trying to use subsidized private sector entities to achieve supposedly "progressive" policy results, thus promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. I explained why, in my view, this is likely to lead to failure both in bringing meaningful progressive change, and in creating a politics that can keep Democrats in power.
I will continue to write the truth, as I see it, and to criticize Obama and corporatist Democrats when I think they're wrong. But my goal is to create greater understanding and progressive mobilization, not to discourage readers or lead them to give up and stay home.

There is still time to embarrass the Democratic leadership into abandoning the deal that was cut, if there was one, and include the public option in the reconciliation bill.  Please call and write to the President, your Representative and your Senator.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal