Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Weiner: Obama Admin. 'Half-Pregnant' with Health Industries
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is "half-pregnant" with health insurers and pharmaceutical companies, which may jeopardize the success of reform.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is "half-pregnant" with health insurers and pharmaceutical companies, which may jeopardize the success of reform. The
congressman -- who is a leading liberal voice in the healthcare reform
debate -- said that rumored deals the White House has struck with big
pharmaceutical companies and insurers may guide them to abandon key
elements of reform, such as a public health insurance option.
"The Obama administration is trying to be, I don't know how to put it, half-pregnant with the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies," he told WNYC Radio today. "They're to some degree the source of our problem."
The Energy and Commerce committee member also criticized the White House's effort to attract bipartisan support for healthcare reform, saying both efforts will water down provisions favored by liberals and turn the bill into a failure.
"I think the White House very much wants to have, even if it's just one person, the ability to say that this is a bipartisan outcome," Weiner said. "And my frustration is we are really as a party are flirting with the notion of minority rule here."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), and Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) are currently drafting a final bill along with White House advisers.
Individuals involved in the negotiations have indicated that a public option is still on the table to be included in a final bill. But some observers have indicated they may drop it because it may not attract a 60 senator majority need to break a potential filibuster.
Yet, Weiner challenged his party leaders to include the option, saying that Democrats are "perilously close" to failing to pass a healthcare bill that would reduce costs and cover enough uninsured individuals.
"Are we going to plow through this or are we going to keep worshiping at the altar of bipartisanship even when it only means essentially one Senator?"
The sixth-term lawmaker also called on his fellow Democratic lawmakers to stand behind a Democrat-only push to pass healthcare reform, saying that negotiations are now in a "post-Olympia Snowe period."
Though he favors a "strong" public option, Weiner made no secret of his support for a single-payer system under which the government would provide or pay for universal healthcare.
"For me a strong public option is a compromise position from my advocacy for single payer," he said.- Posted in
20 Comments so far
Show AllHEALTH CARE REFORM ---- NO WAY
Empire USA is ruled by the multinational rich, they have given up on
America and have shipped most of our wealth overseas, they have
destroyed our unions and we are now powerless.
So the three main reasons we will never get decent healthcare are:
(1) Keeping the people fearful, anxiety driven and insecure is the only
way a capitalist government can achieve submission to authority.
This is what our terrorizing healthcare system is all about.
(2) Capitalist medicine has double the excessive profit of any other
industry in America. Such excessive wealth has never been regulated
and most of those in Congress being well to do capitalists, it never shall.
(3) Danger of a good example. Surely the only way to end the harm in
profit driven capitalist medicine is to move it toward mercy driven government
healthcare, such as Medicare charity. And the domino effect of this would be
a social democracy, total equality and the end of excessive wealth capitalism.
Poor Tony is doing what he is criticizing others of doing--suppporting, however relectantly, the "public option", (aka Health Insurance company relief act), instead of single-payer is still support for the wrong solution.
In the words of Michael Moore, "progressive legislators find your spine"! Yes to single payer and no to any and everything else. Then let's see what the beige Bush in the White House along with his sock puppet majority leaders in both houses of congress do.
Poet
Poet: I totally agree with you about "poor Tony" and single-payer. It was he, after all, who supposedly got a commitment from Nancy Pelosi, via Henry Waxman, that the House would be able to do an "up or down" amendment to establish single payer as the House version of health care reform. So where are the plans to do that, given that over a hundred House members are co-sponsors of HR676? Are Tony and the other "liberal" Democrats in the House only "half pregnant" with their support of single payer? What was the point, beyond the obvious one of deflecting Weiner's objections to the bill in committee, of that supposed commitment for a vote on 676 as an alternative to the reform bill? Sorry, but you're already pregnant, Congressman, and it's a question of whether you'll carry that fetus to delivery or let it be aborted in a "compromise" before there is even a vote on letting it be born.
Kudos for Weiner. No doubt the Obama bots will bring out the big guns to destroy the man.
I shut down one of them yesterday after catching him red handed for his own lying and made it clear that there was proof of his lying. He thought he could get away slandering the best writers on this site. I reported him this morning. Let's hope he's out for good. Let's get ready to tackle them. They will be piling on as midterm elections come closer.
Ranjit, keep up the good fight.
The corporatist drones are back, this time trying to smear Weiner for pointing out that the administration is too cozy with the private health insurers to get behind real reform.
Weiner has never wavered from his position that single-payer is the best reform and trying to paint him as a hypocrite for his willingness to support a public option over a 100% private marketplace for healthcare financing is wedge politics in its most dishonest form.
But then honesty has never been a characteristic of the teabaggers.
q
q: so what's the point here, are Poet and I "teabaggers" for zinging Weiner for supporting the public option rather than the single payer since he "has never wavered from his position that single payer is the best reform?" First I heard of it. Barack Obama has never "wavered" from the exact same position, but it turns out as usual that his "unwavering" support of something (like opposition to don't ask, don't tell) somehow fails to get mobilized when the pedal hits the medal and he actually has to DO something (like vote). We need a clearer definition from you of the distinction between hypocrisy and political realism.
"so what's the point here, are Poet and I 'teabaggers' for zinging Weiner for supporting the public option rather than the single payer since he 'has never wavered from his position that single payer is the best reform?' "
You have purposefully misstated the Congressman's position. Weiner does NOT support a public option over single payer. He is willing to vote for a public option as a preference over no public alternative at all.
I made this point quite clear in my first post and Weiner has made it equally clear in his statements. By sharing the deliberate obtuseness of the teabaggers, you put yourself in their company.
Has either of these proposals come to a vote in the full House yet? If you can show us that Weiner has voted against single payer but for a public option then you'll have a point.
q
q: glad you clarified that, because I am equally as "obtuse" as they in opposing the public option I thereby associate myself with the tea-baggers. I'm still wondering, though, does your finely calibrated system of political morality accommodate the possibility that the same proposal can be opposed from two totally different perspectives without the opponents being put in bed with one another? That seems to be the case with me and others who oppose the option because it is a "compromise" that compromises too heavily toward leaving health care insurance in the dubious hands of the private insurance industry; whereas tea-baqgers see it as too much of a compromise toward a "government" run systen when their real agenda is to reduce government to a size that it will drain down a bath tub. But I guess in Obama centrist-land, with its focus on the politically pragmatic, these differences of viewpoint are just "quaint" and you'll get yourself thrown in bed with other Obama opponents, so matter the ideological basis of your oppositon. Hope them tea-bagger fellows don't pull the covers too much.
I addressed your attempt to defame a decent progressive politican. Whatever your opposition to a policy or proposal may be is another matter.
Simply attacking the public option does not put you in company with the right-wing protesters but doing so by trying to slime Weiner does.
q
Sorry. Misplaced response.
q
Bipartisanship fails when all it accomplishes is to guarantee the enduring quality of our past mistakes and most miserable failures.
The term "half-pregnant" is obscene and offensive. Wiener could have said "tied straight to the health industries" instead.
MichaelGoodhart: "obscene and offensive" the term may be, but not more so than those used by posters here on a regular basis. And their obscenities are likely to be of little substantive value beyond expressing the strong emotions of the user, which is not necessarily a bad thing. "Half pregnant" on the other hand has a real and relevant bite, describing a position that is inherently ridiculous and logically or evidentially indefensible as in "the dog ate my homework." If you believe that Obama or Weiner or anybody else is trying to take two contradictory positions in their "compromises" (first I was for the public option, now I'm against it, or vice versa), "half pregnant" is not a half-bad term to express the scandal of their inconsistency.
Jerry: I didn't think about the users who use foul language on this site. I'm not one of them and I'm sensitive to such use of the word "pregnant". Thanks for the explanation on the term though. I appreciate it.
By the way, I'm a recovering conservative Republican who voted twice for Bush and once for Obama but I am not happy with Obama either. I have been slowly moving left since the end of 2007 so bear with me.
Best wishes for a full and happy recovery...just keep movin' left, my friend. Jerry
Congressmen Grayson and Weiner should run self-help clincs for Democrats called, "Finding your Balls".
and when you go to your doctor next time and he asks
how is your sex life you rep;y that you just got
the worst fucking of your life from max baucus!
Single payer system of health care is the best . The very least the congress can do for the American people is a public option or Medicare for Everybody. So many people call Congress a" do nothing" Congress. If they fail to give the people who are suffering and dying from lack of health care at least a public option and they continue to fund the destructive, counterproductive, deadly war on terror in the Middle East, they will deserve to be called a" death panel" Congress.
Lets get our troops home and focus on fighting the real common enemy of the people of all Nations: poverty, ignorance and disease.