Duh. It was a prime example of how left and right politics makes a mockery out of important issues.
The eternal battle between the left and the right and the liberal democrats vs. the moderate democrats. The liberal attack on moderate democrats is disgusting, immature and very rightwing.
Neither side cared about what was right for Americans who don't have healthcare. The left ignored everything else about healthcare, fee for service and other important reform efforts. The public option for the progressives was the end all, be all.
Now, as quick as switch, liberals are happy campers with the new healthcare compromise, which hasn't been given a cute name yet. Had the left and the right not battled so hard on the point of the public option, leaving everything else out of the debate, we would've been further along. But there's still time to mess everything up.
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Public option advocate Howard Dean explains why the new compromise is good:
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The NYT can't quite let go of the public option (it's hard to support something else, even though it may be better, when you've spent all your time and print space advocating for the public option), saying a weaker public option is better than none. But here is the NYT editorial on the alternative:
MEDICARE BUY-IN People ages 55 to 64 who are eligible to use the exchanges would be permitted to buy coverage from Medicare. Unlike older Americans, this younger group would have to pay the full premium themselves unless their incomes are low enough to qualify for subsidies. The premium could be in the neighborhood of $7,600 a year for single coverage.
Whether people would find Medicare attractive at this price is not clear. Expanding Medicare to cover even a few million people strikes us as promising. Medicare, which pays low rates to providers, might actually offer stiffer competition to private plans than the current weak version of the public option in the Senate bill.
REGULATED NONPROFIT INSURANCE For people below age 55 who are not enrolled in group coverage, the insurance industry would have to create an array of nonprofit insurance plans to compete with for-profit plans on the exchanges in every state. (If industry fails to do this, the government would create them.) The plans would be approved and supervised by the government’s Office of Personnel Management, which administers the health insurance plans offered to members of Congress and federal employees.
These plans could have great difficulty competing in states where they lack networks of doctors and hospitals and where entrenched insurers and hospital combines dominate the market. But that is also true of the weak public option. And in at least some places they would provide more choice for consumers.
At this point, even the 10 Senate negotiators have not fully agreed to all elements of the deal. They have simply agreed to have the budget office evaluate it. Until that is in, it is impossible to know whether this nonpublic option is an acceptable alternative. NYT
