On Monday’s World News, ABC’s Charles Gibson channeled the worry of
liberal activists over the Obama administration’s seeming retreat on
government-run health insurance, the so-called “public option.” Gibson
fretted about Obama to White House correspondent Jake Tapper: “
Will he go to the mat for a public option?” Gibson exposed how one-sided his universe of experts is: “
We
talked to several health care experts today, and they all said if you
take out the public option in terms of insurance, there's going to be
no restraints on the cost of insurance.”
Conservative health care experts see empowering individuals, not
government or insurance company bureaucrats, as the key to creating a
more sensible health care marketplace.
MRC’s Brad Wilmouth caught Gibson’s exchange with Tapper, which
followed Tapper’s piece on how the White House backpedaling was
upsetting liberals:
JAKE TAPPER: The suggestion that the
White House is willing to drop the public plan has sparked a firestorm
of criticism from liberal Democrats.
REP. ANTHONY WEINER (D-NY): If the President thinks we're going to
get the votes without public option, he's got another thing coming.
That won't pass the House.
TAPPER: New York Congressman Anthony Weiner said today the President could lose 100 Democratic votes in the House over this.
WEINER: Some of us who have gotten roughed pretty good at town hall
meetings and stuck in there because we believe in this now kind of feel
like we have a tire track on our chest where the bus that rolled over
us is.
TAPPER: One compromise being worked out in the Senate is for the
creation of nonprofit insurance co-ops that individuals could buy into.
They would be run by those individual members, not the government, and
would compete with traditional private insurance. But, Charlie, House
Democrats say co-ops are just not strong enough to compete with private
insurance companies and thus drive down costs. The White House says the
President has not backed off anything, he still thinks the public plan
is the best way to do this, but he has not drawn any lines in the sand.
CHARLES GIBSON: But will he go to the mat for a public option? He
says now it’s just a sliver of health care reform. But earlier he said
it's a lot more than that.
TAPPER: Well, I think that's exactly right, and I think you saw just
what he is not willing to go to the mat for. If it's just a sliver, why
would he go to the mat for it? The President, at this point, I think
there is a pragmatism that is coming over this White House. They
realize that it is more important for them to pass something, even if
it is incremental and not everything they wanted to pass, and so they
are setting expectations lower and lower.
GIBSON: But, Jake, we talked to several health care experts today,
and they all said if you take out the public option in terms of
insurance, there's going to be no restraints on the cost of insurance.
And one by one, it seems, the cost-saving measures are coming out of
health care reform.
TAPPER: That's exactly right, and you saw over the weekend Secretary
of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius also said that it looked
like the end of life care provisions would also be gone from the bill.
And that's another area where they had hoped to achieve real cost
savings. So this bill is really being winnowed down considerably.
GIBSON: All right, Jake Tapper at the White House tonight.
—Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center.