Democrats Lash Out At Obama Over Health Care Disappointments

I have been silent on health care for last six weeks. No one wants a blow-by-blow description of a car wreck taking place in slow motion.

I predicted in September that the White House did not originally want a public option and that all the talk about it was political theater, designed to distract and offer hope to loyal progressives, even though the Obama administration knew they were going to let Progressives down.

Because, the White House gambles, who else are Progressives going to vote for? These are the people that care, and are at zero risk of voting for Republicans in the next election, so they can be largely ignored. Well, others in Washington are beginning to see the truth of the real White House intentions on Health Care Reform:

While many House Democrats have expressed anger with the Senate for the watered-down bill, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) argued that it was really Obama who let centrists take control. “Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left these people in charge?” he said. “It’s time for the president to get his hands dirty. Some of us have compromised our compromised compromise. We need the president to stand up for the values our party shares. We must stop letting the tail wag the dog of this debate.”

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) similarly suggested that blaming Lieberman was ignoring the real culprit — Obama.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

Democrats Lash Out At Obama Over Health Care Disappointments.

Political calculations: the White House wants insurance corporation money in the next bid for the White House in 2012.  Political theater: One must not appear as if political calculations are all that is driving this debate, hence the discussion of the public option, as if it were something real, as if corporate money did not exist. 

Update: Glenn Greenwald, at Salon.com, discusses the exact same thing.

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash — easily — was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.

From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).

Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP — will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.