This is for you, Joe Scarborough. Yet another poll shows ridiculously high support for a public health insurance option.
The rest of the poll is rife with the kinds of contradictions that arise from the gap between what people want, and what they are willing to do for it. What a surprise, for example, that a poll of people who 89% of have health insurance think that health care reform is too focused on insuring the uninsured, as opposed to controlling costs. As if insuring the uninsured does nothing to control costs.
To be clear, I think polling is irrelevant to whether the public option is a good idea. The public can be idiots. I mention it because the public option is a good idea, and since the public supports it so overwhelmingly, there’s no good reason for the Democrats not to pass it.
When I saw this item at HuffPo, declaring that Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly backs the public health insurance option, I immediately thought “There has to be a catch.”
The clip at HuffPo was only about a minute long, so I figured there must have been a walkback later in the interview. I found the full interview at the Heritage Foundation’s website. There’s no walkback, but the clip has some great moments. Not only does O’Reilly nail why the public option is necessary, he also makes several comically half-assed stabs at pronouncing long lost Janeane Garofalo twin Nina Owcharenko’s name:
While O’Reilly doesn’t back off from his support for the public option, he does preface his remark by saying it’s not going to happen. Aside from my own reporting to the contrary, O’Reilly might take heart from this widely-circulating clip from yesterday:
While media accounts of the death of the public option may have created the impression that public support for it may have waned, perhaps repetitions of this scene, along with some actual facts, will help to turn that tide in favor of O’Reilly and “the folks.”
This analysis seems to spring from these two sentences:
For example — for example, some have suggested that the public option go into effect only in those markets where insurance companies are not providing affordable policies. Others have proposed a co-op or another non-profit entity to administer the plan. These are all constructive ideas worth exploring.
So, two sentences placating the GOP’s and Blue Dogs’ macaroni art constitutes a repudiation of the public option?
When they finally did ask again, 79% of Americans said they favor a public option.
What hasn’t really changed, and what everyone acknowledges, is that almost everyone opposes the pubic option. That’s the one where the insurance companies have you by the short ones, able to refuse you coverage for a pre-existing condition, deny your services with their own death panels, retroactively terminate you if you get sick and made a mistake on your application, and pretty much just build their profits into whatever coverage you get, because your life depends on it.
The problem is, the public option is the only real solution to the pubic option. There’s no way to pass regulations strong enough to ensure that you don’t end up with cheap, junk insurance that’s already putting people in the poor house (Try to remember the last time your auto insurance paid for anything). The public option will serve as that safety net, and despite even more recent rumblings that it’s been left for dead, the President can, must, and will make sure it passes.
Every few weeks, it seems, the media is reporting the death of the public health insurance option, so I was happy to see them move on to a new target, the Gang of Six and the idea of a bipartisan reform bill. What’s really cute is watching seasoned pros buy into the idea that the White House, in a Popeye-esque brogue, is going “That’s alls I can stands, I can’t stands no more!”
The public option was never not going to be allowed to pass. The fact that the Republicans are giving the White House cover now is just an awesome bonus.
Tonight, I introduce the postlet. The name might indicate a short blog post, but what it really is is a post that’s short on links and polish, and long on me mouthing off because I am constantly having my time wasted, so I’m really annoyed. I’m also including a random picture, because I like my posts to have a picture, but I don’t feel like thinking of one that goes with this post.
I’m not going to tell you who has been wasting my time today, because I want you to have the fun that comes with those “blind gossip” items, like, “Who’s the blonde starlet recently seen playing nude backgammon with that married entertainment lawyer?” or “What committee has press people who don’t, y’know, interact with the press?”
On a completely unrelated note, someone in the press is finally noticing how awful the $80 billion PhRMA deal is. Except not really. This Fortune article misses everything I pointed out in June, but does point out new awfulness that’s based on details that hadn’t emerged when I wrote mine. So, add this + this. Well, I guess now we know all we need to know about that story.
At today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs cited an NBC poll that shows that shows that only 45% of Americans currently believe in “Death Panels.” He cited this as evidence that the President has been effective in debunking myths about health care reform.
I would argue that 45% is an awfully large number to believe in a health care Sasquatch, but even granting that, the President’s effectiveness at combating myths is cold comfort if the Democrats in congress don’t get the message. I asked Gibbs what happens to the next health care provision to become the subject of an urban legend:
TC: On health care, you were talking about Chuck’s poll earlier, that — I mean, the good news that most Americans no longer believe in death panels. But the fact remains that Section 1233 was taken out of the House bill. So what can you do to reassure voters that the same fate won’t befall other provisions of the bill if some rumor like the death panels gets started about the public option?
MR. GIBBS: I don’t — I’m not following the thesis of your — the section that’s been pulled out.
TC:Section 1233 about the end-of-life care.
MR. GIBBS: It’s been?
TC: There was a report earlier this week that it’s been dropped.
MR. GIBBS: Well —
TC: Is that not true?
MR. GIBBS: This is in a Senate Finance Committee bill that nobody has seen? Look, what I’m saying is, I think the President is going out there and explaining what those provisions are and what they’re not — regardless of whether they’re in what section of what bill at what time, I think it’s something that the President has been focused on doing and correcting the record. I think it has more to do with a sustained dialogue in dealing with the misrepresentations as it has whether or not a provision may or may not have been dropped.
While I’m happy to credit the President with quelling some of the “death panel” nonsense, I would be more comforted if he could lend some of his, shall we say, fortitude to his panicky congressional standard-bearers.
Boo Hoo, how will we pay for health care reform? Waaaaa! It can’t be done, Obama wants to go back on his word, he wants to tax the middle class, oh, wait…’the middle class pays no federal income taxes.’ Why? Because the middle class are a bunch of freeloaders I say!
The big story this morning, aside from Mad Men and Michael Vick, is the death of the public health insurance option. On TV, on newspaper front pages, and on blogs, various stages of the public option’s demise are being reported. The basis for all of this pessimistic reporting? Statements, this weekend, by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the public option is not a deal-breaker.
Ex-sueeze me? That’s the big news? This is one of those questions that come up so often at White House briefings, we can all recite the answer like a well-dressed Rocky Horror audience. “The President strongly supports a public health insurance option, but the main goal is to provide health care reform that results in quality, affordable care for every American.” (throw toast at Gibbs)
The media has stood ready to stick a fork in the public option since this debate began. Off the top of my head, there was this July report that Rahm Emanuel had “caved” on the public option by answering this very question. That story was quickly walked back by the President later that day.
The White House’s strategy seems to have been to “rope-a-dope” on the public option, putting it out there and letting opponents punch themselves out at it. In the end, the White House doesn’t need the Republicans, or many of the Blue Dogs, to push this through. The question is whether or not they realize what’s at stake.
An even bigger question is, why is the media so ready to eulogize the public option? While recent polls have reflected slipping support for health care reform as it is being debated, those same polls either show overwhelming support for the public option, or they simply don’t ask.
There are two obvious answers. First, corporate influence over the mass media that drives news coverage is always a popular go-to bogeyman, and not necessarily in the tinfoil-y, paranoid sense. A media culture that intersects so strongly with a corporate culture is bound to reflect those values disproportionately.
There’s also the voracious nature of the 24-hour, 1440-minute news cycle that grants outsized importance to mundanities and inanities, particularly in the entertainment-starved dog days.
The answer is a combination of the two, abetted by desperate and dishonest opponents of the public option and their squeaky wheels. Look for the White House to spend the day, and the week, pushing back against this.
In June, I wrote a story that raised big questions about the value of the government’s $80 billion deal with Big Pharma, and wondered if the deal came with the trade-off of killing legislation that would enable the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical compannies for lower prices. Such a trade-off would be indefensible.
That week, I took extraordinary steps to determine if this was the case. I spoke personally with a White House Deputy Press Secretary twice, followed by multiple emails. I also spoke, personally, to the press official for the Senate Finance Committee, followed by multiple emails. There was no doubt as to what I was asking. I never got a response from either of them.
That Thursday, I asked Gibbs about it at a daily briefing:
Q Thank you, Robert. I have two quick ones on health care. The first one, in the speeches about the $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical companies, I haven’t heard anything about negotiating price — Medicare negotiating price with the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to know if that was one of the tradeoffs for getting this $80 billion was that we’re not going to pursue that now.
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, again, the structure of part of that agreement was to use a portion of that $80 billion to pay up to — for the pharmaceutical industry to pay up to 50 percent of the cost for a name brand drug for a senior that falls between the point at which Medicare Part D stops providing help, and when catastrophic coverage — I think it is $6,500, a little bit more than $6,500 — level kicks in. So filling in that — what’s commonly known as — ironically, in health care — the doughnut hole, about — that up to 50 percent of the name brand — the price for that name brand drug would be paid for, and I think that provides a hefty discount that will bear appreciable benefits for seniors all over the country.
Q Has there been an agreement not to pursue a Medicare –
MR. GIBBS: I don’t know the answer.
Q I’m talking about S. 330.
MR. GIBBS: What was that?
Q Senate bill 330?
MR. GIBBS: You’re 330 bills ahead of me on that. (Laughter.) I will check on it.
Of course, now, the New York Times reports that the White House confirms that the deal did include an agreement to kill price negotiation laws:
In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement….A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night.
“The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”
This is deeply disturbing on many levels. If Gibbs didn’t know about this provision after the deal was made, then it stands to reason that the President didn’t know, either. With the Senate Finance Committe stonewalling me about it, one could conclude that they kept the President in the dark about it until it was already a fait accompli.
The other possibility is that Robert Gibbs was left in the dark, a frightening prospect for a White House reporter, and for any American.
Beneath it all is the fact that the government dealt away our right to negotiate lower drug prices (just like any other large customer), and they did it for peanuts. This is a disgrace.
I emailed Gibbs and his deputy for an explanation, and am awaiting a reply.
Update: Jake Tapper asked Gibbs about the discrepancy at today’s White House Press Briefing.
TAPPER: Can I just ask a quick follow up? In June you were asked about the deal and whether or not the deal with PhRMA implied that the White House signed off on no other legislation, such as allowing Medicare to renegotiate with PhRMA. And you said you didn’t know the answer to that. Was it because you personally didn’t know or because the Senate Finance Committee hadn’t informed the White House of that aspect of the deal?
GIBBS: You’re asking me to recall why I didn’t remember something in June. I — I — that I don’t know the answer to. Obviously, the agreement that we have is — is in the confines of health insurance reform that’s being worked on right now.
At today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs cited 
Daily Dose 
You must be logged in to post a comment.