If the public option is jettisoned, reform is jettisoned. Potential cost containment is jettisoned. We are left with an important initiative - health insurance assistance, but not reform.

what we'd be left with is the greatest boon to health insurance company's bottom lines since they dumped most of the admin work on the insured and their dr's.

Then again, by routing the payments through individuals, it is easier for all of the power players in this charade - government and private insurers - to blame the victims for not getting their money's worth; and say that it was the consumers' fault for choosing the wrong plan or something along those lines.  The vaunted personal responsibility excuse for government failures of epic proportion.

"This thing has been pretty watered down. Right now, it's about as watered down as it could be and still be a real bill. For example, there's really no insurance reform in this bill, already," Dean said on MSNBC.

He added that the Senate bill is "decent" and the House bill is "better." But, he said, insurance companies can still charge double for those with pre-existing conditions under the House bill.

"There's not a lot left to this bill. The public option is about it," Dean said.

Providing health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans is nothing to sneeze at.

You mean requiring (mandating) that 30 million uninsured Americans buy health insurance policies without sufficient competition (at best a small, weak PO option likely to wither further) to control prices or a realistic means to protect benefit quality, etc? In short, to manage the monster (I agree regulation by and large won't work).

Why do so many people say "provide" when "require" is the word? "Provide" is the way insurance industry sold the Massachussets plan and the current national healthcare "reform" modeled on same. "Provide" folds in nicely with a soft-sell liberal style, comfortable and reassuring. If one means "provide" subsidies, that's not insurance but an elaborate welfare system built on top of corporate premiums with profits to Wall Street, hardly "liberal" but that's where Obama and most Dems have brought us (a screamable moment).

"Nothing to sneeze at," boiled down to its essence, is plenty to throw up at when one considers the consequences this HCR boondoogle could bring to American consumers and to the Dem party. Not a "budget buster" but a Treasury buster (already busted so we print dollars unendingly). Why are we accepting this? Why are we not fighting back. Even if we lose this battle, we'll win the next one, especially if we show bravery and great arguments? We have to be willing to lose one if we want to eventually win. We're in an unacknowledged economic civil war and refusing to fight. Fighting for the strongest possible PO and going down in glory is better than caving in on a weekly basis. Palin is popular because she is perceived as "fighting back." Dems, meanwhile, are perceived as wimps.

"No mandates without public option" should be "strong/robust PO available to all from the start" since I doubt the PO as currently formulated (with opt-out or triggered opt-in -- as weak and whittled down as humanly possible -- is going to get bigger and stronger. No, with lack of political resolve in this WH and Congress as a continuing trend in next decades the PO is going to get weaker and smaller until we are standing naked under mandates with little protection at all.

It's economically irresponsible not to be fighting like hell for single payer/Americare (Medicare for All), even a matter of national security (it could be argued) if only to avoid sandbagging the Treasury to subsidize commercial premiums when we could largely cover the low-income/uninsured margins with the mandate windfall under an SP system. Instead, that mandate windfall goes largely to Wall Street which has little loyalty to our national (economic) security.

"Is the House bill better than nothing?" Angell asked. "I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right."

Women will not stand for this and we will find it unacceptable to vote again for ANY Democrat, I can assure you.  If the only way the Democrats can push a bill through at the expense of millions of women, they are clearly corrupt and unfit to govern.

Obama has been clearly absent on this and many other issues regarding Healthcare that he was obliged to show leadership on. He's fumbled,
dodged, dithered, and travelled a lot. But he hasn't been in touch with us as people, and finds it acceptable to destroy decades of women's struggles for equal protection and choice away if he finds it politically convenient.

I'm amazed that fellow Democrats haven't seen the callousness of this, and haven't been able to simply understand that without a clear and robust public option there is only one thing that will happpen:

 Millions of people forced to take private insurance and deliver billions more to insurance monopoly, and no possibility of a public option as a safeguard that would level the playing field
by offering a real choice.