What I wish Obama would tell liberals about the public option

Look, I'm sorry I've dicked you around about this for the last year. It's a good idea, but there are other ways, but I'll push for it if the votes are there, but it's not in my consensus plan... Crikey, why one of you hasn't announced a primary challenge already I'll never know.

So here's the deal. At this point, the public option doesn't have the votes. The House managed to include it in its bill, which passed with a couple of votes to spare. But we're going to lose a bunch of the abortion nuts this time around because the bill includes the Senate language, so we're going to need to pick up some votes from conservative Democrats who aren't wild about the PO. And the Senate - good God, who knows what the Senate would do with the PO. I mean, we could have 55 votes in favor, and then Joe Lieberman throws up some roadblock to reconciliation that he dug out of the Senate rules from 1809. Plus, suppose we pass the damn thing, what have we got? The weakest possible version of the public option that practically no one will be able to use.

So we've gone another direction with this thing. No public option, but we're going to regulate the hell out of the insurance companies. Regulate 'em back to the stone age, which for them is pre-Reagan, when they were just a bunch of not-for-profit paper-pushers. We're going to repeal their anti-trust exemption, we're going to increase competition through exchanges and interstate competition, we're going to put a cap on the proportion of premiums that can go to administrative expenses, we're going to keep them from cherry-picking their customers; and if none of that works, we're going to just slap price controls on them. They're going to be regulated utilities like they are in Switzerland.

Now, if you liberals still want a PO, then you're going to have to man up. First, drop this weak crap you put in the House bill and push for something substantial like Medicare for Everyone. Then, run on this in November. Motivate the base - the only way to stave off horrendous defeat is to give the liberals something to vote for. Me, I'm going to stay out of this one, because, well, I'm kind of a wuss. But I'll tell you what I'll do for you: I'll go to the black community in every contested Congressional district and I'll tell them that their job didn't end when they left the voting booth in 2008. They didn't turn out in record numbers to vote for a failed one-term black president, did they? No, they wanted a successful two-termer who was going to make real change to benefit their communities. Well, that's going to require them to show up in big numbers in the midterms as well as in years that are divisible by four.

So let's get this thing done now, without the public option. And then you come back and fight hard in 2010 and beyond.