Progressives Push Back on Health Care

In a web cast to supporters, President Obama emphasized that he "had a responsibility to the American people" to get a health care reform bill out of Congress "one way or another". Only three members of the other party are working to pass a health care bill according to the President. It may be, the President continued, that the Republican political agenda will prevent bipartisan support. He retreated from comments he made at the weekend in a Grand Junction, Colorado town hall meeting where he seemed to signal a willingness to dump the public option part of his proposed insurance exchanges. His remark was later echoed by Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius who said inclusion of a government plan was not an "essential element of reform". He told the supporters gathered for the web cast that he supported a government run insurance plan as one option from a menu of insurance choices available to consumers as "a belt and suspenders" approach to making the health insurance market work. In response to the previous equivocations, sixty progressive legislators in the House sent a letter to Secretary Sebelius saying that passage of a bill in the House depends upon including a robust public option provision. Obama said the controversy created by his comments was somewhat "manufactured", and that the media fails in its obligation to inform the people of the truth in the midst of a propaganda campaign. He used the "death panels that scared grandma" as an example since making end of life counseling available is a concept that Republicans have supported previously. Obama told supporters to give people who already have insurance the facts when talking about reform. One of those facts is that doing nothing will cause Medicare to go into the red in eight years due to out of control health care costs.