Obama’s Un-Sellable Hodgepodge of Minor Health Care Changes

[Donnachaidh]

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/02/22/obama-unsellable-hodgepodge-of-minor-health-care-changes/

The big question right now is, how do you sell Obama’s new health care proposal? His proposal is basically the Senate bill with some minor tweaks. Some of the changes should be popular–like a minor increase in affordability tax credits–and some changes–like an increase in the individual mandate penalty–should end up very unpopular. What I don’t see is a strong public argument for using reconciliation–or any big move–that would manufacture more support for the unpopular Senate bill.

The biggest “improvement” that might be used to justify the reconciliation bill could be the new “Health Insurance Rate Authority” to prevent unreasonable premiums increases. The idea should be popular, but it seems unlikely to make it into the final bill. I would be curious to see how this compares in polls to, say, Medicare buy-in, which actually stands a chance of not violating the Byrd rule and, therefore, becoming law. I guess Democrats hope to blame Republicans for this new agency’s failure, but as we have seen with the public option, promising a popular policy that Democrats don’t plan to actually deliver can blow back hard.

:snip:

This proposal by the White House shows a misunderstanding of the mood of the country. It is now clear that Obama always wanted a bill very much like the current Senate bill, and simply can’t see that it is a bad bill, unpopular with the American people for policy reasons. The White House keeps blaming messaging because they are too ego-driven to admit that they made a bad product. They are trying to keep the currently very unpopular Senate bill as unchanged as possible, which is a big mistake. This shows a tone deafness to the American people who’ve said that they don’t like this bill as it now is. There needs to be big, new improvements to show people that the Democrats heard the complaints, and responded by making the bill more consumer friendly, and less a giveaway to the insurers.


My bolding in the paragraph above -- more at the link --

[berni_mccoy]

1. FDL-- Friends to Fox, supportive of Teabaggers and backed by Norquist. Nuff said.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[berni_mccoy]

3. Right for the personal attack. Nice. This thread has promise.

[Champion Jack]

4. FDL=Bullshit

[jaxx]

5. A rightwing bloggers opinion isn't going to be very supportive

of health care reform, or worry about the people who have no insurance now. Really, if the republicans were so pure in this they would have voted yes on the things they got added to the plan. But, of course, they didn't.

Pass it and let the people have health care, that has been the goal all along.