Always Be There For You

by digby

Jonathan Cohn writes about Jay Rockefeller’s strange effectiveness in talking about the public option, which I have found kind of surprising myself. He explains it this way:

It’s easy to treat health care as an abstraction–to make it all about economic theories and Congressional Budget Office projections. (I’m surely guilty of this myself.) Rockefeller sees it through the eyes of West Virginians making $30,000 a year–people who just want to know they can pay their premiums and that, if they do, the insurance they get will protect them when they get sick. Rockefeller’s ability to channel these feelings may seem odd, given his privileged pedigree. But it makes sense given what he’s done with his career. Remember, West Virginia didn’t choose him. He chose West Virginia, starting with his service as a VISTA volunteer. He knows his constituents very well. And he acts that way. You see this in his advocacy for the public plan. The arguments you hear in the debate are mostly about costs, payment rates, and how best to make a market function. But for Rockefeller, it really boils down to a simple proposition: A public plan is good because you know it will always be there for you. The government isn’t going to point to an obscure provision on page 152 of your manual and deny you essential services. The government isn’t going to comb through your medical records and decide that, having taken your premiums for several months, you’re not eligible for coverage after all. The government isn’t going to stop offering coverage next year because it can’t make a profit big enough to satisfy Wall Street. Reform without a public option can still remedy a lot of these ills, as long as there’s enough regulation. But it’s not clear there will be, which is why Rockefeller is speaking out–and why he should be.

(Considering the bipartisan whorishness of our current political system, it’s almost a guarantee that there there won’t be the kind of regulation needed to give security to average people. We’ve just seen that you can nearly destroy the world economy and wipe out more than a decade of accumulated wealth with unbridled greed and they won’t properly regulate you.)

I think Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad and Max Baucus all have plenty of constituents who make 30k a year just like Rockefeller. But they’d rather see them suffer than risk being called a socialist by some confused teabagger or lose a big campaign check from Blue Cross. It’s a choice. And what they choose tells you a whole lot about the character of those making it.

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