Word: reformer
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...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...
...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 market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals." (See pictures of the angry health-care debate...
...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...
...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...