Thursday, September 10, 2009

Surprise--Sort Of

The Obama never ceases to amaze me with the power of his oratory if not the boldness of his programs.  He gave the speech I had thought he should give--me and an army of others, which is to say that I have no fantasies that the Obama's web crawlers detected, retrieved, and shared anything from this blog--with that one glaring exception.  He could not voice the inevitable conclusion--that a single-payer program is the only reasonable solution to this mess....  I think he knows that insurance combines, coops, or whatnots won't work because the insurance companies are not going to reform, not going to change their ways and offer simple, affordable comprehensive health insurance when they can get together and offer scores of plans with suites of options and prices longer and more complex than the great chain of being or an airline reservation system.  I think the Obama has made the calculation that the system has to be given one last chance at self-reform before Congress will vote for a single-payer plan.


In any event, whether he anticipates it or not, that's likely to happen. Let's hope that it happens before the insurance industry can inflict too much more harm on people.


For now I'll just admire the speech. He turned the tables on the Republican lunatics.

1 comment:

Retrieverman said...

And what helped Obama is the Republicans acted like a bunch of middle school boys.

I do hate that we're in debate over which party is going more out of its way to exclude undocumented people from basic human services.

These people without documents should be covered-- not just as a human right but as a way of further reducing costs to our health care system. If they're covered, it will reduce costs as a whole.

But that logic never won these debates. The last I heard the Republican talking point was that death panels were not in the bill, but that bill (of which there are several) does not explicitly prevent the existence of death panels. So basically, the Republicans have nothing and are now making even more spurious arguments.

The Republicans are a wonderful side show to all of this, but I'm still watching the blue dogs.

I've not given up on the public option yet, but if we get one, it will be less than ideal-- I can see doughnut holes coming up and maybe one of these ephemeral "triggers" that never gets pulled.