Bipartisanship and Feauxpartisanship
| By Ray Seaman - Jun 22nd, 2009 at 9:53 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Front Page Posters |
The healthcare debate reached a new level last week as the House and Senate released early proposals for comprehensive healthcare reform. The main bone of contention, as you might have expected, is the one item that determines whether this reform is truly reform or not: the inclusion of a public option for health coverage that competes with private insurance plans.
Politics is a funny thing. You see, Senate healthcare "leaders" like Max Baucus (D-MT) believe that we just have to have bipartisan support in order to pass meaningful healthcare reform. The House, on the other hand, has mostly left the notion of bipartisanship by the wayside, with Speaker Pelosi saying that there will be no healthcare vote in the House without a public option in the final reform package.
So, under the banner of "bipartisanship", Sen. Baucus and his cohorts in the Senate have proposed a healthcare plan without a public option. The House, obviously, has released a plan that does. So who turned out to be truly bipartisan in the sense of a broad coalition of individuals from both political parties and independents agreeing on a solution? Not the Senate - not by a long shot. Recent polling from NBC and The Wall Street Journal now shows 76% of Americans want a public option for healthcare:
Personally I take this as clear evidence people want some alternative to their often expensive, unhelpful, and unreliable private health insurance. A public option makes sense to Americans.
The Senate is practicing Washington DC's version of bipartisanship - feauxpartisanship - caving to the extreme right of American politics when things get tough.
There is such a thing as bipartisanship, and on healthcare, it's the center-left position of having a public option, not some far right idea cooked up at the Heritage Foundation and sauteed in corporate money.
Politics is a funny thing. You see, Senate healthcare "leaders" like Max Baucus (D-MT) believe that we just have to have bipartisan support in order to pass meaningful healthcare reform. The House, on the other hand, has mostly left the notion of bipartisanship by the wayside, with Speaker Pelosi saying that there will be no healthcare vote in the House without a public option in the final reform package.
So, under the banner of "bipartisanship", Sen. Baucus and his cohorts in the Senate have proposed a healthcare plan without a public option. The House, obviously, has released a plan that does. So who turned out to be truly bipartisan in the sense of a broad coalition of individuals from both political parties and independents agreeing on a solution? Not the Senate - not by a long shot. Recent polling from NBC and The Wall Street Journal now shows 76% of Americans want a public option for healthcare:
76 percent of respondents said it was either "extremely" or "quite" important to "give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance."
Personally I take this as clear evidence people want some alternative to their often expensive, unhelpful, and unreliable private health insurance. A public option makes sense to Americans.
The Senate is practicing Washington DC's version of bipartisanship - feauxpartisanship - caving to the extreme right of American politics when things get tough.
There is such a thing as bipartisanship, and on healthcare, it's the center-left position of having a public option, not some far right idea cooked up at the Heritage Foundation and sauteed in corporate money.
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