Obama is the first to point out that he isn't proposing a nationalized health care program. But the right-wing wants to make it about that. Obama and his people have to spend all their energy defending criticisms that are not only as made-up as something out of Harry Potter but are completely irrelevant to the proposed reform.
Which proves that I was right all along to worry that the Obama Administration was shooting itself in the foot months ago by refusing to even allow discussion of single-payer health care (a publicly-funded, privately-delivered nationalized system like Canada's). Single-payer advocates were most definitely 'not invited' to the forums earlier this year which were supposed to be for public comment. The forums were stage-managed to reflect only the opinions of entrenched health care powers. Doctors and nurses who've been working for single-payer for years were excluded from public debate in ways the bitter townhallers only dream about, so turned to getting arrested for interrupting congressional meetings and protesting at insurance companies. Even Rep. John Conyers, Jr., the author of the single payer bill HR 676,was very nearly kept out of hearings in D.C.
When a plan has a little of this and a little of that, it's convoluted, and the public can be scared off of it. People end up sounding like bureaucrats when they explain how it will work; it doesn't have the impact of a strong vision. It would have been better to defend a principle rather than a compromise.
Though Obama used to support single-payer before his presidential run, he obviously thought he'd face strong opposition if he tried to advance the idea now. The Democrats are perpetually delusional that if they don't rock the boat, maybe the right-wing won't say mean things about them. At the very least Obama could have made it clear to the rumor-gullible that single-payer is one thing, and a public option is something else.
If the Democrats had opened a full discussion on single-payer, and allowed the concept of a fully nationalized health care system to be defended by its advocates, the task of convincing the public that government-funding of health care isn't socialism, doesn't have 'death panels', and won't mean mass injections of a flesh-eating disease agent, would to a large extent be handled.
I guess people might have ended up insisting they get it, though.
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