Word: optional
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Everything is different this time - everything, that is, except the plan. The Democrats are seeking mostly the same policies they sought 15 years ago: mandates, regulations on insurance companies, new government-managed markets. The major difference is that this time they also want a "public option," an insurance program open to everyone and run by the government. Obamacare is Clintoncare with a little more liberalism...
...headlines and news coverage coming out of the Aug. 16 shows may have seemed to mark a major turn in the debate over health-care reform. "White House Backs Away From Public Health Care Option," cried Politico.com. The New York Times led its story with a declaration that the Administration had "sent signals" that it was moving away from "its once-firm vision of a government organization to provide for the nation's 50 million uninsured and was now open to using nonprofit cooperatives instead." And the Drudge Report, predictably enough, was running a big photo of a white flag...
...Face the Nation, where he said that Obama's "bottom line" is that there should be "choice and competition in the insurance market." Hardly a new development, considering that the White House and the President have been sounding pretty flexible for months on the subject of a public option. Spokeswoman Linda Douglass reiterated that in a statement on Aug. 16. "Nothing has changed," she said. "The President has always said that what is essential is that health-insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health-insurance...
...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...
When I asked Obama about the public option in an interview on July 28, he described something that sounded more like an insurance company than a big new government program. "We defined it fairly clearly in terms of what we thought would work best," he said. "It shouldn't be something that's simply a taxpayer-subsidized system that wasn't accountable, but rather had to be self-sustaining through premiums and that had to compete with private insurers." Under this definition, a cooperative arrangement, of the type being talked about by the Senate Finance Committee, might fit the bill...