One of the strange, much-remarked on features of the health care debate is the vast power both sides assign the public option. Conservatives consider it socialism, and left-leaning Democrats seem to conflate it -- at times deliberately -- with the broader idea of expanding coverage.
"I need open heart surgery, but have no insurance, and no company will insure me," he says, saying he and his wife owe more than $100,000. "None of this debt would have piled up if I had the option of buying into a public health insurance plan."
A video targeting John Boehner offers another awful story: A constituent's family whose young daughter died, and were left with more than $10,000 in debt because her surgeries had exceeded the lifetime limit on their insurance.
"We need the public option. Insurance companies need compeittion to keep them honest," says the narrator.
What's striking is the total disconnect between the ghastly stories and the notion of a government-administered plan. The two families specific woes -- pre-existing condition barriers and lifetime caps -- would be reversed by the Baucus bill that the group is campaigning against. Subsidies for people who can't afford insurance will apply toward both public and private plans under bills that include (limited) public options.
There's obviously a broader structural argument in favor of the public option as a way to control costs and change the structure of the health care industry. But they have no discernible connection to the heart-wrenching stories that the group is broadcasting.
I asked PCCC's Adam Green about this apparent disconnect, and he emailed back:
The big-picture point of our ads is that insurance companies cannot be trusted because they profit by denying people care....Rules won't prevent this -- because all private companies will look for the same loopholes in the rules. Competition with a good-faith actor is the only thing that will prevent this. If the private companies exploit loopholes, and the public option puts the public health first and doesn't exploit loopholes, consumers will go to the public option -- forcing private companies to stop exploiting.
That's the common thread of all our ads and our stories. Insurance companies cannot be trusted. They need competition.
Others on the left, meanwhile, are fighting battles over legislation's immediate impact on poor and middle class people, which has everything to do with the generosity of the subsidies. The centrist DLC also released a paper this week (.pdf) arguing, essentially, that the public option is a distraction and that other questions -- insurance regulations and mandates, affordability, and the structure of an insurance exchange -- will actually determine success or failure.
Todd Palin did say that Alaska would remain their home base and indicated that, despite the millions that may come their way after his wife leaves office, he had no plan to give up his blue-collar jobs.
“I’ll always be a fisherman, I’ll probably always be out working on the slope,” he said, alluding to his oilfields job in the state’s far-northern tier.
A number of the post-vote questions to Lula focused on how he had won an election against United States President Barack Obama – who had spoken up for Chicago. But Lula said: “It was not Lula who won and Obama who lost but Rio which won because it presented the best bid.”
He revealed that when the morning’s TV news had shown President Obama flying in on Air Force One, other members of the Rio bid team had given up hope of winning.
Lula said: “Because we were a colonial country, we developed the habit of thinking small; we thought only other countries could achieve things and we couldn’t. But this is not the case.
"When I was at the recent G20 meeting I invited President to come to Copenhagen. He said he wouldn’t go but his wife would. So I said: ‘Well, if you don’t go I’m going to win.’ Then he came anyway but God still wished that we would win.”
Lula concluded: “Today I feel even more pride in being Brazilian than even I had ever felt before.”
Controversial Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann is among the hosts of her home-state governor's first Washington, D.C. event for his new campaign Freedom First PAC, scheduled for October 22.
The event -- a gathering at a brewery for "pints and pretzels" represents a bit of a class play: Pawlenty is positioning himself a bit downmarket, as it were, from the wealthy Romney.
The 2016 Summer Games were to be Daley's legacy. Now the mayor comes home to face recession-driven budget woes and concerns about violence that plague Chicago, without the ability to change the public dialogue to Olympics talk.
It's easy to overestimate these things. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg bounced back quickly from the loss of the 2012 Olympics four years ago (ironically at the hands of a coalition advised by David Axelrod).
There's a reason the president is rarely dispatched to a summit whose outcome is uncertain.
And Chicago's elimination in the first round of voting has to raise questions about whether the White House was getting accurate information about how competitive this was from Chicago's Olympics organizers.
The White House staked, and lost, some prestige on that one.
A new Gallup survey finds that President Obama's support from Jewish voters remains strong -- a reminder that the vocal concerns about Israeli policy remain a minority view in that community.
The only religious group that likes him better: Athiests.
The low-intensity battle over Sarah Palin inside the Republican Party flared a bit just now, as former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt offered his assessment:
"Were she to be the nominee, we could have a catastrophic election," he said.
Ezra Klein and Brendan Nyhan produce some charts suggesting that these midterms will be different from, particularly, 1994 because of the depths of Republican unpopularity.
Obama's pitch to the International Olympic Committee this morning is very much about his and America's identity, and not the IOC's sometimes transactional politics, raising the stakes for the decision:
We stand at a moment in history when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations -- a time of common challenges that require common effort. And I ran for President because I believed deeply that at this defining moment, the United States of America has a responsibility to help in that effort, to forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world....
No one expects the Games to solve all our collective challenges. But what we do believe -- what each and every one of you believe and what all of the Chicago delegation believes -- is that in a world where we've all too often witnessed the darker aspects of our humanity, peaceful competition between nations represents what's best about our humanity. It brings us together, if only for a few weeks, face to face. It helps us understand one another just a little bit better. It reminds us that no matter how or where we differ, we all seek our own measure of happiness, and fulfillment, and pride in what we do. That's a very powerful starting point for progress.
Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. Presidential election. Their interest wasn't about me as an individual. Rather, it was rooted in the belief that America's experiment in democracy still speaks to a set of universal aspirations and ideals. Their interest sprung from the hope that in this ever-shrinking world, our diversity could be a source of strength, a cause for celebration; and that with sustained work and determination, we could learn to live and prosper together during the fleeting moment we share on this Earth.
Now, that work is far from over, but it has begun in earnest. And while we do not know what the next few years will bring, there is nothing I would like more than to step just a few blocks from my family's home, with Michelle and our two girls, and welcome the world back into our neighborhood.
At the beginning of this new century, the nation that has been shaped by people from around the world wants a chance to inspire it once more; to ignite the spirit of possibility at the heart of the Olympic and Paralympic movement in a new generation; to offer a stage worthy of the extraordinary talent and dynamism offered by nations joined together -- to host games that unite us in noble competition and shared celebration of our limitless potential as a people.
And so I urge you to choose Chicago. I urge you to choose America. And if you do, if we walk this path together, then I promise you this: The city of Chicago and the United States of America will make the world proud. Thank you so much. (Applause.)
Evidently sensitive, after all, to the perception that he wasn't hands-on in Afghanistan, the President met the commander there this morning in Denmark.
Per the pool:
A development aboard Air Force One.
After the President boarded the plane, he held a meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal to discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tells us.
The general had been in London, and flew to Copenhagen specifically to meet one-on-one with the president.
They met in the president's forward cabin aboard the plane.
McChrystal left the plane after the 25 minute meeting and is not flying on to Washington with us.
""The president wanted to take the opportunity to get together with Gen. McChyrstal ...'' Gibbs said.
A source tells me Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, the former executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association, will be named today to head the national Head Start program.
Sanchez will be the first Hispanic to head the program, and her background in working with the complex problems of educating the children of migrant workers is a shift from the office's traditional sharp focus on urban issues.
As the Director of the Office of Head Start, she'll be running a roughly $9 billion federal program.
In her former position, Sanchez-Fuentes worked to convince farmworkers to send their children to school, rather than taking them out of the field; and also accused immigration enforcement officials of staking out Head Start centers in search of illegal migrants.
General McChrystal pushes back, for now, on conservative attempts to push a wedge between him and the White House, Spencer Ackerman reports (in not entirely worksafe terms):
The process of going through a very detailed, policy-level debate, is incredibly important and incredibly healthy. The president led that very effectively, and so I think this is a very necessary process to go through so we come to a clear decision and then move forward.
UPDATE: As a reader points out, however, McChrystal took something like a direct shot at Vice President Biden's views -- a reason why it alarms administration allies how open the internal rift has become.
Carper wants to allow states to individually decide whether to create a private-insurance competitor such as a government plan and a nonprofit insurance cooperative, or to open up state-based insurance pools for government workers to every resident.
It could appeal to Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who has endorsed a similar trigger approach, while bringing in progressives who may not see a way – at this point – to pass a bill through the Senate with a public option.
