Evidently Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), grew some stones and decided to go with a public option with an opt out clause. Jonathan Cohn does the heavy lifting on explaining this.
That is all fine and good. But what I am becoming increasingly concerned about is how caustic and perfunctory the dialog on health-care and policy is in this country.
Pundits and our representatives in Congress, do a horrible job of discussing actual policy. They are obsessed with process, to the occlusion of the actual merits of any policy.
Also bipartisanship has becoming fetishized.
What I mean by that is. You are dealing with a two party system in which, agree with them or not, one party is actually proposing solutions and the other is standing in the corner pouting and mumbling "No". You have a minority party that is more conservative and more of a regional party then it has been in almost two decades, yet pundits still compare it to more sane congresses of the past?
You literally have people running around saying that the majority is "too liberal". By definition, to have a large majority you have to dilute the ideological purity of your party. Speaker of the House Pelosi (D-CA) can not win in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nor could, Sen Inhofe win in New York state.
There are metrics for scoring programs. Methodologies for evaluating policy implications. Yet these thing are always secondary. Pundits, congressmen and spokespeople who have very little actual expertise in economics, science or what have you are always focused on more then actual experts.
Even experts I do not agree with are more useful then a congressmen/woman who is just spouting ideological nonsense.
-Cheers
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