Is a pale imitation of health care reform worth saving?

I was all set to write a fire-and-brimstone post condemning everyone involved in the Great Betrayal on health care reform and calling for liberal Democrats in the Senate to kill the piece of shit masquerading as a bill.

We have finally reached the point at which what we have really is worse than nothing. Kill it, I thought, and go full-out for single-payer.

Then I read Zandar:

Ezra Klein describes the current health care situation in the Senate as hostage negotiations.

The hostage-takers might not prefer to kill the kid, but there's definitely some upside to killing the kid, as it strengthens them in future negotiations. Conversely, the people on the other side of the phone don't want the kid to die, but also don't want a situation in which hostage-taking is encouraged. Generally, you try and resolve that by killing or capturing the hostage-takers, but that's not really an option here, with the closest analogue being a kamikaze primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln, which would come too late to affect health-care reform anyway.

This is actually incorrect.

Ezra still assumes that both sides are negotiating. To have negotiations, both sides must operate on good faith. This isn't any more of a negotiation that it was with the Republicans. What this is here is a plan to demand so much from the bill that the progressives are the ones that kill the bill and get blamed for it. It's patently obvious if you take into account 3 things:

The Senate corporate masters do not want any bill to pass at all. The GOP and the ConservaDems do not want to take the fall for killing the bill. Obama has to pass a bill or else he will be a one-term President.

Ergo, the easiest way to get rid of the Dems and Obama is to have the progressive Dems revolt and kill health care reform. This was the plan all along. The Republicans and ConservaDems are there to make the bill so horrible that passing it will be worse than not passing it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/23/dean-dems-in-deep-trouble_n_367666.html Howard Dean gets it. People still think the point was to kill the bill. It wasn't. The point was to kill the bill in such a way that nobody ever tries health care reform again. Ever.

The point is to bring down Obama in such a way that kills the Dems for decades and finishes off the Donks for good.

Steve Benen has a slightly less pessimistic take:

Put it this way: imagine there's a big meeting with every member of the Democratic caucus in both chambers. You stand at the front of the room and make a presentation: "If health care reform falls apart after having come this far, tens of millions of Americans will suffer; costs will continue to soar; the public will perceive Democrats as too weak and incompetent to act on their own agenda; the party will lose a lot of seats in the midterms and possible forfeit its majority; and President Obama will have suffered a devastating defeat that will severely limit his presidency going forward. No one will even try to fix the dysfunctional system again for decades, and the existing problems will only get worse."

For progressive Democrats, the response would be, "That's an unacceptable outcome, which we have to avoid."

For conservative Democrats, the response would be, "We can live with failure."

This necessarily affects negotiations. One contingent wants to avoid failure; the other contingent considers failure a satisfactory outcome. Both sides know what the other side is thinking.

Yes, progressive Democrats can force the issue, keep the bill intact, and force Nelson, Landrieu, Lieberman, and Lincoln to kill the legislation, in the process making clear exactly who was responsible for the debacle. But that's cold comfort -- the goal isn't to position center-right Dems to take the blame for failure; the goal ostensibly is to pass a bill that will do a lot of good for a lot of people.

The push for more "compromise" isn't going to be pretty.

And indefatigable public option champion Robert Reich isn't giving up:

It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."

And yet Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson mumble darkly that they may not even vote to allow debate on the floor of the Senate about the bill if it contains this paltry public option. And Republicans predict a "holy war."

But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word "public?" Make it available to only twelve people?

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

I'm still not giving up. I want every Senator who's not in the pocket of the private insurers or Big Pharma to introduce and vote for a "Ted Kennedy Medicare for All" amendment to whatever bill Reid takes to the floor. And if this fails, a "Ted Kennedy Real Public Option for All" amendment. Let every Senate Democratic who doesn't have the guts to vote for either of them be known and counted.

Reich has more on how we got here from Medicare For All. Read the whole thing.