Opinion: No public option? Now what?

By , on January 15th, 2010

So we didn’t win the Public Option.  It has been replaced with a vaguely defined government-regulated insurance exchange.

Additionally, labor leaders were not able to completely remove the tax on working people to generate money for that program.  As of now, they were able to:

  • delay the tax for those of us who are state/local government employees or who have collectively bargained agreements, 
  • to increase the thresholds for premiums taxed for women, seniors and those with high risk occupations—whose health insurance premiums tend to be higher, and 
  • to exclude dental and vision from the calculations for the tax (starting in 2015).

    • Nevertheless, the inclusion of any tax on working people instead of taxing the corporate interests that got us in this situation in the first place is a qualitative loss from what we started with.

    This is not the bill we fought for.

    Single-payer advocates and many others might argue that we did not demand enough in the first place.  And there is definitely validity in the notion that organized labor should have done more to support the single-payer movement outside of the beltway, even if they were pushing the public option on Capitol Hill.

    In light of the recent

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    January 15th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Campaigns, Health Care | Comments are closed