Knowing when to stand your ground vs. compromise is the key to getting a lot of stuff done in politics. And in the past 72 hours, I've wavered between "progressives need to flex their muscle and show that we can compromise, but we won't be compromised," as Keith Olbermann put it, and "we really need to cash in our chips while we can."
The fact is, passing this bill is money in the bank. It's political mojo for the Democratic party. It provides a massive amount of subsidies for the poor, the working poor, and the middle-class to help them afford coverage.
It absolutely does not preclude Congress or the Democratic Party taking up the public option issue in the future. So while I think it's great that progressives are flexing their muscle right now and saying, "enough is enough," we need to remember to keep this fight a family fight, and stick together when it's over. And we shouldn't be letting Rupert Murdoch-owned blogs fuel the fire that temporarily divides us.
Here is my list of reasons why we should pass it now:
- This bill contains the dirty but necessary elements of healthcare reform. It contains massive subsidies that drive up the total cost. But once these subsidies are in place, let the Republicans be the ones to take the political risk to take them away and let families die. It's much more risky to take things away than to implement new programs. Once we get the subsidies passed, introducing a future bill to reform the system to a government-run system should require a lot less cost, and thus, a lot less controversy. For this same reason, the mandate should also be passed now. What is the functional difference between a mandate to buy (in some cases heavily subsidized) insurance, and a tax on everyone to include them in a single-payer system? If you ask me, there is not much difference at all. It's a relatively easy argument down the road once everyone is buying insurance to simply switch it to a tax if everyone is paying in anyways.
- The public option in the current plan was a watered-down one anyway. Given our political environment today, how efficiently this plan operated would have been under intense scrutiny. Would you rather have a watered-down version of a public plan providing the example for how single-payer might function, or would you rather wait a year or two once the conservative manufactroversy dies down to pass a strong, more robust public option? The way this bill is structured, we have a couple of years to tweak the plan with future bills before it even gets fully implemented.
- The public option is a more popular part of this plan. It enjoys broad support across both Democrats and Independents. While I admit that this fact makes it bizarre not to pass the public option now, the flip side of that is that the public option should be relatively easy to pass in the future, as well, especially if premiums continue to skyrocket. We should have no trouble passing a public option, because, even despite the desperate Republican scare-tactics about government healthcare, the public option still enjoys broad support, and shouldn't be hard to get added on in a simple bill somewhere down the line.
This bill gets the dirty work out of the way right now. All the potential political albatrosses are in this bill. The subsides. The mandates. The fact that it is a big change itself. If we can get this through, we will have all the political mojo next year, and we will have an issue to campaign on in 2010 (the public option). We will also have the moral high-ground.
I don't give much credence to the notion that we'll never have another opportunity to reform healthcare further down the road. We decide what the issues are, so if we want it to be an issue, it will be an issue. The fact is that this bill lays the dirty but necessary political groundwork for universal healthcare of some variety in the United States' future. Oh ye of little faith who think this is our one and only shot, you neglect how far we have come even in just the last five years. Progressives are far more organized, and far more adept at fighting conservative lies, misinformation and propaganda than they have been for over a generation, if not longer. That's not going to go away. We will have power in the future, too. Demographic trends favor us as well.
So while it's good that we are flexing our muscles and showing that if Big Insurance/Big Pharma can throw a hissy fit when they don't get their way, we can too, we have to remember that we're still a family and the faint notion of a group hug somewhere in the near future should lie in the backs of all of our minds. The public option right now simply does not have 60 votes in the Senate, and that's just a political reality. If you don't like it, get 5 more progressive senators elected to office instead of taking your ball and going home or leaving the party. And please, stop reccing blogs from the Wall Street Journal to the top of the rec list. That's embarassing.