I don't think it's dead. The lack of a public option in this scenario isn't fatal. You're still giving people access to group coverage that they don't currently have, and there is still a lot of administrative reform that, I believe, will help.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that some months from now, somebody in the government will hold aloft a charred cinder and declare victory for health care reform. But it won't be anything I would recognize as reform. The boundaries of the political discussion were so narrow, and the range of the corresponding media coverage so limited, that they precluded that. The main thrust for Obama -- I'm going to start calling him President Hope -- has been to make sure that the drug companies and insurance companies don't get upset. In that respect President Hope is no different from any of the other zillion US politicians on their payroll. I don't know this gent Taibbi, but a friend forwarded his (long) piece in Rolling Stone:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrongThe best summary paragraph, I think from page 6:
"But Reich's comment assumes that Obama wants to give the bill coherence. In many ways, the lily-livered method that Obama chose to push health care into being is a crystal-clear example of how the Democratic Party likes to act — showering a real problem with a blizzard of ineffectual decisions and verbose nonsense, then stepping aside at the last minute to reveal the true plan that all along was being forged off-camera in the furnace of moneyed interests and insider inertia. While the White House publicly eschewed any concrete "guiding principles," the People Who Mattered, it appeared, had already long ago settled on theirs. Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the "individual mandate" is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry."I am perhaps neither as cynical or optimistic as he. Revolt? Ha.
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