BREAKING: Here is summary of the Ted Kennedy healthcare plan now circulating Capitol Hill.
According to a message late last week from Kaiser Health News, the partisan debate around healthcare is not Democrat v Republican but one of Bludedog Democrats v. Liberals. 51 Bluedogs support a public healthplan like Medicare if it is voluntary where 78 Liberals have cosponsored cradle-to-grave expansion of Medicare as compulsory while, in Stalinist fashion, prohibiting most other forms of insurance.
So, like the gun debate, only outlaws will have private healthcare?
Oxdown at Firedog has posted what may be a fair representation of the various health care plans being forwarded at the moment and who in Congress is carrying who’s water. Here are the options so far:
1. Insurance/Pharma favorite. Public insurance plan only after some triggering event (e.g., the failure of the industry to meet its cost-reduction goals which it sort-of promised to Obama). Supported by centrists like Bacchus, and is being pushed by Sens. Grassley and Snowe.
2. If a public insurance plan option is allowed, hobble it: Many possible variations of this, e.g. Sen. Schumer last month.
3. Allow a public insurance plan option that looks/works like Medicare, but is separate from Medicare; Sen. Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) has proposed a concept along these lines.
4. Make Medicare the public option and open it up to everyone who wants it, but not make it mandatory. Consumers would be free to choose public or private options. (Apparently no one carrying this bucket favored by so-called progressives).
5. Pure single-payer, which purports to have widest support but no support in the Senate. Like a good Stalinist plan, it would replace/restrict or exclude the choice of private options.