The Political Whore

By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio

Thursday night’s Town Hall Rally on health care with Congresswoman Kathy Castor in Ybor City has been dissected throughout the country thanks to YouTube.

The atmosphere both inside and outside of the Children’s Board was as intense and, at times, incendiary as the days after the presidential election in Florida in 2000.  (I’ll never forget Day 3 of the 36-day recount in West Palm Beach, when I saw Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler sprint for safety into a trailer from incensed Republicans after finishing a live interview with then CNN anchor Greta Van Susteren).

Although the failure of both houses of Congress to vote on health care legislation before the August break was initially viewed as a loss of momentum for President Barack Obama, the fact is that the American public does need to sit and discuss what is in this once-in-a-generation legislation.

Unfortunately though, through the first week of the Congressional recess, the Town Hall format ain’t the place where that’s happening (and probably won’t , as more members of Congress can use footage of Tampa, St. Louis and Detroit to blow off further encounters).

The fact of the matter is that Americans – specifically, seniors have serious anxieties about what’s in the proposals, or at least what they think is in it.

Discussions about rationing and end of life care are intensely personal. The possibility that government might be involved in those potentially life and death issues is frightening people, and President Obama and his Congressional allies need to do more (as he did this past weekend) to allay those fears.

For years (if not decades), the GOP has accused Democrats of demagoging on the issue of Social Security.   Whether accurate or not, Republicans feel they are using that formula back on Democrats on health care reform.

Democrats could be clearer on what reform means, specifically when it comes to the public option.

Right now, it’s a tabula rasa that the likes of Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Rick Scott and others are exploiting as a form of socialized Soviet-era medicine that will end the health care system as we know it, which is proving effective in polls where people who do have coverage think they’ll lose it (President Obama’s maxim that you won’t lose your doctor be damned).

For progressives, real health care reform would come come in the form of a single payer system. But that got the boot by the President before serious negotiations ever began.  Now, the killer app is the public option.  If it’s not part of the final plan, many Democrats in the House say they’ll bail.

And that might happen. In the all important Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus has removed the public option to appease two of the three Republicans in the negotiating room, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley and Wyoming’s Mike Enzi (Incidentally, all 6 of the Senators in that Committee reportadley represent a grand total of 2% of the population in the U.S.)

Some liberals think Baucus is going overboard in trying to appease Grassley and Enzi, since there is little evidence to indicate that even if they sign off on a plan in committee that rank and file Republicans will follow suit.

Instead of a public option, that committee has replaced it with a network of member-owned cooperatives.

What’s the difference? Plenty, according to Yale Political Science professor and author of The Great Risk Shift, Jacob Hacker.

He calls the co-op proposal “largely untested and symbolic,” adding that it fails on a couple of fronts: That it won’t be  cost control backup, nor will the co-ops have the authority or reach to implement what he calls “innovative delivery and payment reform in increasingly consolidate insurance markets”.

And he quotes West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller: “Will co-ops be effective in going after insurance companies?  The answer is a flat no.”

House Democrats feel the same way. The Congressional Democratic Caucus’s 57 members have said they will reject legislation without a public option, as has Tampa Representative Kathy Castor, who told members of the media last week shortly before the now infamous Town  Hall that, “a robust public option is vital to lowering costs, keeping these insurance companies honest. I am not interested in saying to people in the Tampa Bay area to take personal responsibility, but there’s no option than going to a private insurance company that’s organized to make a profit and when you look at the multimillion dollar CEO salaries and executive compensation packages , the way to go to bring real competition is a strong public option.”

Back to last week’s Town Hall in Ybor City, a critic of health care reform wrote to me this weekend that Thursday was the “best non Town Hall I’ve ever heard.” He went on to write about why he and others interrupted Castor was completely legitimate. Interesting. Castor (as well as Texas’ Lloyd Doggett, also the recipient of an ‘excited’ response by anti-health care reform folks) says the negative reaction just reinforced her feelings about the subject.

But who knows?  Rep. Castor may still reject a bill that comes her way later this year. But if so, it won’t be because of what happened last Thursday night.

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