Word: optionally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 so far as to suggest that a public plan might be necessary only...
...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...
...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...