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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...
...this big news? What started the flurry was a comment on CNN's State of the Union by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that a government-run plan is "not the essential element" of the Obama Administration's drive to overhaul the country's health-care system. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed that point on CBS's 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...
...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 by providing an alternative to purely private insurance. When...
...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 than a means to an end - one that he would be perfectly willing to achieve through other avenues...
...voice coming through the public-address system was familiar yet strange. I had not heard it in at least 27 years, not since I had traveled to the sacred Madhu Shrine in northern Sri Lanka in August 1982 when I was a child and on pilgrimage with my family: "Aandavane" ("Oh, Holy Lord" in Tamil), "Aandavane." The words spread through the church compound where half a million others had made the same journey to see Madhu Matha, the Mother of Madhu, in her sacred precincts...