Every sane liberal and Democratic activist and analyst who has a brain knows that co-ops are a worthless concept only put out there so Max Baucus and his bi partisan jelly fish can help rip off the American people and pad the pockets of the health care industrial complex. Welcome to our liberal elite.
ALTER: Well, there has to be some kind of cooperative, maybe what they call a souped-up cooperative, one that can actually withstand pressure from insurance companies which in the past have taken something like BlueCross, which is originally nonprofit and turned it into just another insurance company. So, the problem with the co-op idea is that it-they have been putty in the hands of the insurance company. But there still is room for compromise there. They could design a new kind of co-op that could provide some real competition.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
ALTER: It could be essentially a public-private option that satisfies enough people to get something through. So, I don't think liberals should go, you know, public option or bust. There are other alternatives and you have to remember that there are many, many important things in this bill that have become almost non-controversial that two years ago, if you'd been told they're going to-they're going to end discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, they're going to insure another 30 million Americans, we say, "Great, where do we sign up?" And now, some progressives are-maybe a little bit too wed to the public option. Even though, my favorite, too, but we shouldn't go down with the ship, with the public option.
Listen, Jonathan. There is no room for compromise with co-ops. Jay Rockefeller already disproved them in detail, if you were keeping track of these things. It's a con game cooked up to fool people like you into thinking Kent Conrad and Chuck Grassley would actually design a new kind of SUPER CO-OP that will save the day. Are you that daft or just sucking it up for the David Broder-bipartisan coalition?
We were promised real health-care reform, not some sad sack of a plan that includes ginned-up co-ops that have all been panned by the "serious people" who write about health care. As usual we're the dirty f*&king hippies who better live without our public option. Obama was only elected with a clear mandate to reform health care and we should be thankful for what we get.
Bob Shrum jumped in with the same lame argument and he said on Hardball that if co ops are included that provide competition then the bill is just fine too.
SHRUM: I certainly think he should do that. reconciliation was...
MATTHEWS: No, he doesn't have to. SHRUM: ... used by Reagan. It was used by Bush.
MATTHEWS: No, but what's the-if he has to choose between a bill that comes out of that bipartisan panel in the Senate, Finance Committee, and going with a much more liberal bill, what would you do?
SHRUM: I would-I would look-I'd judge it by what's in that bill. If there's a co-op that effectively does provide competition with the insurance industry, then I think you can move forward. By the way, in other respects, that bill is not a vastly scaled-down bill. It's $100 billion less over 10 years out of a program that costs $1 trillion over 10 years.
What data does he have to suggest that co ops can bring that to the table? None.
