Rep. Lynn Woolsey, co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus, told ABC News in an interview that she’s “absolutely” certain that a health care bill will pass, but added that it’s “only a beginning.”
“The day this bill passes, and if it doesn’t have a public option in it, I’m introducing my public option bill,” said Woolsey, D-Calif. “On to the next.”
Bingo! This is what House Progressives should be doing. This is what Tom Harkin said a couple of weeks (months?) ago. With the passage of even the crappier Senate Bill, Health Care turns from a one a decade discussion to a yearly discussion. "How are we going to improve the Bill this year?"
“Once you break the [special interest] stranglehold and you get the architecture in place, then it is not a massive reform to change this or add this or modify that,” he said. “My hope is that we move ahead on this and as reforms are in place, people will begin to say, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize that was what they were talking about.’ As more and more of these reforms take place, people will say that this is good, but we need something else, to change this or do that.
“In the future, amending it and changing it isn’t going to be as tough as passing it in the first place. We amend Medicare and Social Security all the time. We are changing rates, fixing this, doing this to make sure that they are viable. That’s what we will do in health care. I’m absolutely convinced of it.”
And there is one other thing Harkin is convinced will eventually come to pass: A public option.
“At some point in the near future, and I don’t know exactly how long it is going to be, we are going to have some sort of a public option out there,” he said. “We might not get it in this bill, but it will come in as the years go by and as people begin to look at insurance companies and how much they are charging. I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to have to go to some kind of a public option, some type of a single-payer type system to bring the costs down. When the administrative costs of Medicare is somewhere around the 3 percent range, but the administrative costs of the private insurance companies are in the 15 percent range, there is a lot of money that can be saved by going to a better system such as a single-payer or a public option-type system.”
Fine by me. More (and quicker) Public Option, the better...
