Politics: Public option debate?

Labor Unions plan to fight for the public option found in the House bill which was a deal breaker to get to 60 in the Senate bill.

Politicians often speak out of both sides of their mouths so much that we are rarely outraged by the fact that they do.

The Public Option debate is one of those issues where they double talk all the time.

One on hand some believe the ideal system is a single national system like Canada or the UK thus substituting the current problems we have with a whole bunch of other ones. But since they know the US voters don't like a single national plan, they propose a public option that they say will be offered along with the private system hiding the fact that they could write the rules in such a way that the public option would eventually become the only option which is what they really want.

Further compounding the double speak is their assurances, contrary to their internal desire for a single system, they make that the public option would compete on an equal footing with private insurance plans to increase competition in the marketplace. Oh, the wonders of free market capitalism, they seem to support. But, of course, the only way a public option would compete on a truly equal footing is to configure it like a private insurance plan which it obviously can't be by definition!

A public option would have an implicit or explicit ability to receive taxpayer support. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae didn't have an explicit promise of taxpayer support but the people running them consciously or unconsciously knew they had a taxpayer safety net and acted accordingly playing a big part in the real estate loan bust-up. Imagine a similar entity for health care insurance?

I have also heard that the public option would be immune to lawsuits unlike private insurance. And of course, there are tons of regulations placed on private insurance. Some regulations make sense of course but it really isn't about making things better, its about the Federal Government picking winners and losers and gathering more power to itself.

So when you hear politicians make some claim about health reform ... you can figure in their heads and behind our backs they are saying something else.

Yep, how do we know politicians are lying ... their lips are moving.

How sad is that?