Well, not all of you are wrong, but some are. And Ezra Klein is right:
It might have been a necessary thing from an activism point of view, but convincing liberals that this bill was worthless in the absence of the public option was a terrible decision, wrong on the merits and unfair to the base. The achievement of this bill is $900 billion to help people purchase health-care coverage, a new market that begins to equalize the conditions of the unemployed and the employed, and a regulatory structure in which this country can build, for the first time, a universal health-care system. Thousands and thousands of lives will be saved by this bill. Bankruptcies will be averted. Rescission letters won't be sent. Parents won't have to fret because they can't take their child, or themselves, to the emergency room. This bill will, without doubt, do more good than any single piece of legislation passed during my (admittedly brief) lifetime. If it passes, the party that fought for it for decades deserves to feel a sense of accomplishment.
Chris Bowers has always been right. He first argued that "pragmatic" types who wanted to give up early on the public option were fools, that the public option is good on the merits and he is tired of progressives being defeated because they are "reasonable." He may have added: keeping the debate focused on "public option yes or no" has the fantastic effect of protecting all sorts of other good things in the bills, including a massive expansion of public, single-payer Medicaid.
However, yesterday Bowers pointed out that he is not willing to see thousands of people die and millions go without insurance in order to protect a weak version of the public option. Amazingly, there are apparently many folks on this site and elsewhere, folks who I greatly admire, who are willing to see those folks die in order to preserve the symbolism of a progressive movement that does that compromise.
I disagree: I think a massive expansion of health care coverage (with modest-but-important starts on health cost controls) is worth a fight. A weak public option is worth a weak fight, not a do-or-die battle. While we focus on the public option, huge flaws in the bills go undebated. Liberal health economist Jon Gruber notes:
The current bills are not perfect. The Senate bill has a mandate that’s too weak and doesn’t provide generous enough insurance to low-income individuals, and the House bill doesn’t do enough to control costs. Nevertheless, passage of a hybrid of these bills would be a major accomplishment and a turning point for our dysfunctional health care system.
We should be pushing for a much stronger employer mandate and moderately more generous subsidies in the Senate bill. If you are a cost-cutter, you can push for more cost-cutting in the House bill. These things will improve the lives of actual Americans much, much, much more than the current "weak" versions of the public option.
And yes, a true "robust" public option would be great. Single-payer would be better. And I want a Pony and, even more, an end to the Senate filibuster rule, which is the real anti-democratic villain of the HCR story.
OK, flame away.