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Privately, White House officials have been downplaying the importance of a public plan, saying it is far more important to focus on the structure and the regulations surrounding the state insurance exchanges that would be created as the marketplace for insurance under a revamped health-care system. These exchanges would give purchasers of health insurance, whether they be individuals or businesses, an option of plans to choose from, all of them offering at least a minimum package of benefits and a guarantee against exclusion for pre-existing health conditions. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has even gone...
...only way. "The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health-care reform," Obama said at a town-hall meeting on Aug. 15 in Grand Junction, Colo. "This is just one sliver of it, one aspect...
...public option that has become an ideological hot button, he said, "I think in theory you can imagine a cooperative meeting that definition. Obviously, sort of the legal structure of it is less important than practically how can it operate." (Read Tumulty's interview with Obama on health care...
...fact is that Obama's stand on the public option has never fit neatly into the narratives on either side of the political aisle. The left has come to view it as the holy grail of health-care reform - in no small part because many liberals believe that a Medicare-like program for the uninsured would be the first step toward a government-run single-payer system like those found in Canada and Europe. The right has made it a focal point of its opposition for the same reason. However, Obama has never presented the public option as anything other...
...find a compromise. But it could help keep some shakier centrists aboard. And it would lower the intensity of the heat around the entire debate, by removing an issue that the White House has increasingly come to view as a distraction from the larger goals of its health-care reform...