Rahmbo Signals Fold On Public Option

The WSJ is reporting this morning that Obama's Chief of Staff is willing to make a deal on the public option in order to get health care reform passed, pointing to the Medicare trigger option the GOP crafted in 2003.

It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Monday.

"The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest," he said in an interview. "The goal is non-negotiable; the path is" negotiable.

His comments came as the Senate Finance Committee pushed for a bipartisan deal. To help pay for the package, the committee planned to announce an agreement Wednesday with hospitals and the White House for $155 billion over a decade in reductions to Medicare and charity-care payments for hospitals, according to a person familiar with the agreement. That will help pay for the legislation, expected to cost at least $1 trillion over 10 years.

One of the most contentious issues is whether to create a public health-insurance plan to compete with private companies.

Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet President Barack Obama's goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.

Mr. Obama has pushed hard for a vigorous public option. But he has also said he won't draw a "line in the sand" over this point.

If a public option for health insurance is reduced to a trigger option that will purposely be crafted to never happen, there will be no health care reform. There will still be 50 million uninsured Americans, and most likely there will be a lot more as health care continues to get more expensive and employers simply drop coverage altogther, putting health care out of reach of more and more Americans.

Republicans and ConservaDems now know the White House is now willing to fold on the public option and go with a trigger clause or junk it totally. This could be the death blow to Obamacare.

Less than 48 hours after Sen. Chuck Schumer announced that there would be a public option, we now see that the deal has been struck, a set of trigger conditions that will assure the public option will never happen.

The Dems fighting for a public option win. They put one in. The ConservaDems and insurance lobbyist GOP win, they wisely made sure it would never be activated. The White House wins, they went along with the public calls for a public option.

The American people however, lose. Unless Digby's right and Rahmbo is playing 45 dimensional chess, Obamacare just died on the hospital bed. Lee Stranahan at HuffPo is far less sanguine about it.

In the past few days, a disturbing reality has come into razor sharp focus - the White House may be completely willing to go along with the lobbyist funded Senators on selling out real health care reform for America.

If anyone wanted to hold on to the illusion that perhaps President Obama was actually doing a head fake with 'moderate Democrats' in his call suggesting that they shouldn't be attacked for taking huge amounts of health industry money in exchange for creating faux reform legislation that would entrench and benefit the private insurance industry, Rahm Emanual made it clear on Monday that the compromise is a pre-approved condition at the White House.

It looks like Obama's played his supporters for fools once again, and I for one am getting sick of it.