Health Reform: The Senate Finance Committee DEBATED The Public Option Today!
Anyone who has tuned in Senate floor "debate" on C-SPAN2 knows how deadly dreary it can be and how little is debated. Today, the Senate Finance Committee actually DEBATED and defeated Senator Rockefeller's (8-15) and Senator Schumer's (10-13) amendments to add a public insurance option to the committee's health reform bill. After spending many hours in committee and on the Senate floor, I'm hard to impress. Today's DEBATE was the best I've seen in a very long time. It was like watching the 1971 Ali - Frazier heavyweight fight top all the advance publicity. Senator after senator made well informed and hard hitting statements pro and con. They were respectful of each other and kept interruptions to a minimum. They actually listened to each other. If Congress puts on more debates like this, its abysmal ratings might improve. Today's votes were never in doubt, but these amendments will come back when the full Senate considers the bill later this year. I hope to see more informed debated as we saw today.
I was not fortunate enough to
I was not fortunate enough to see the debates. However, I did see some snippets of the debates where the debates still do not meet my standards regarding intellectual honesty.
Sen. Grassley misrepresented Senators Schumer's and Rockefeller's amendments adding a public option, claiming these amendments were single-payer plans. That is a lie. When challenged, Grassley conceded his point but then responded with another lie, that it would lead to a single-payer model, citing two arguably unreliable and certainly highly biased sources, Heritage and Leweyn (sp?) Group, as evidence that people would mass migrate to the public option (and we should prevent that?).
Even if the public option were popular beyond Democratic party expectations, that would not crowd out private insurers. For example, many retirees pay a private insurer for their Medicare Advantage plans. And there are many other developed countries that have a mix of public and private insurance options.
Another specious argument was Sen. Baucus voting twice against the public option while verbally claiming he's for the public option. His argument was he can count and he doesn't see 60 votes for the public option. It's specious because he doesn't need 60 votes for the public option, he needs 60 votes for cloture and 51 votes for a health care bill that contains the public option. It's my understanding that caucuses within legislative bodies do not filibuster their own party, they vote cloture and then vote their position. As long as they can wheel-chair Sen. Byrd onto the Senate floor they've got their 60 votes.
So please excuse me for staying on the side of those people who are not happy with our Congress. The Republicans are dishonest, delusional idiots and the Democrats' leaders in Congress maintain their cowardice or in Baucus' case, willingness to defend his financial constituents over what the majority of Americans want (though I'm not sure where support in his home state lies regarding the public option).
BTW, I'm a self-employed business owner, a former Reagan Youth, always pro-economic growth, who is tired of getting ripped off by health insurance companies. There is not market rationality in that industry, sellers have all the information and buyers have virtually none.
I'm continually learning as claims are filed that we're not insured like we were led to believe. Just today I learned that our $2 million dollar cap on certain popularly used items is not $2 million like it states on the summary pages, but instead merely $2000, essentially nothing. I support the public option because I believe having that choice will help better insure that consumers actually have the health insurance we believe we have prior to requiring treatment, rather than finding out after services are rendered we're not really as fully insured as we thought we were.
Finance Committee health reform debate
I have no problem with the points you made. I've just logged enough time listening to specious arguments and misrepresentations that when some real, honest debate creeps in, I get excited.