Are Liberal Networks Groups Helping Obama Fail?
by Jeff CohenLink to article
The following is an exerpt from a Huffington Post column by Jeff Cohen. See entire article at:
“I’ve started deleting them as spam.
I’m not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or “You’ve Won the Lottery” notices.
I’m talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a “public option” for health care — a government insurance plan citizens could choose to pay for instead of private insurance.
Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans,
the wrong way to get it was to make that the demand.
Especially of a president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing.
Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.
For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician — and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?
Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).
Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option — to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All….”
Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America .
Tags: Blue Dog Democrats, government insurance plan, Jeff Cohen, Medicare-for-All, public healthcare option, Senator Baucus