Aides to President Barack Obama are putting the final touches on a new strategy to help Democrats recover from a brutal August recess by specifying what Obama wants to see in a compromise health care deal and directly confronting other trouble spots, West Wing officials tell POLITICO.
…senior adviser David Axelrod said in a telephone interview
“I’m not going to put a date on any of this,” Axelrod said. “But I think it’s fairly obvious that we’re not in the second inning. We’re not in the fourth inning. We’re in the eighth or ninth inning here, and so there’s not a lot of time to waste.”…On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.“We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition,” an aide said. “There are lots of different ways to get there.”
I want “all or nothing.”
Personally, I wouldn’t want a crappy bill to pass that is basically a hand-out to insurance companies, requiring everyone to obtain insurance policies, without an affordable option, or without some serious, SERIOUS, reform on ratings and exclusions.
I think about auto insurance and how there is an insurance commissioner (at this time, in each state) in charge of reviewing rating plans. Each car insurance company has to file with the commissioner with their proposal for a rating plan (the mathematical equation that weights risk). The commissioner monitors the companies profits or losses and allows (approves or denies) for changes in their rating plan where rates increase (if the company is losing so much money so as to not be able to pay out their own claims), or rates decrease (too much profit). Perhaps some sort of loss/ratio should be maintained? (This, assuming the health industry must be kept in the private sector because our congressmen are too chicken to vote on a public option.)
I don’t know if that will help much, because there is still an issue with hospital costs, malpractice suits, education costs, etc. It’s all f*cked up. Sigh.
