I rarely agree with anything that is said on Fox Fake News. However, Obama’s healthcare summit that was held on February 24th was truly what they termed “political theater.” It was to make it seem that Obama was Mr. Bipartisan and to justify the passing of an insurance industry bill which in no way represents real reform. Insurance companies are chomping at the bit for their paid-off Democrats to pass it in reconciliation.

I’ve discussed this in past CommonSense2 articles, but if you remember, right after Obama was elected he said single payer was off the table and presented us instead with the term ”public option.” As it turns out, that move was just to contain and keep quiet those who advocated for real reform. It worked splendidly. All we heard from the Democrats was “public option”, and yet Obama never even approached members of Congress to include it in the bills. It was never once explained exactly what a “public option” was nor did anyone tell us that it would only be available to those with no medical coverage. Nor did they tell us where the money would come from or who would benefit from the government’s largesse. Never discussed is the immoral mandate that everyone must buy insurance or they will be fined (and I assume ultimately jailed if they fail to pay the fine) which is in both the House and Senate bills – insurance companies are loving this part of the bills. It also has not been explained how the 31 million will be chosen for coverage out of the 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance and what will happen to other 19 million.

What showed this to be pure theater was that Obama not only banned single payer/Medicare for All advocates from his summit but refused entry to any “public option” advocates as well. He is good at what he was hired to do – his rhetoric sucks Democrats in and makes them think he’s doing the right thing while sticking it to them on behalf of the insurance/pharmaceutical/military/industrial complex. It is disgusting to see how he and most of our Democratic legislators sold, and continue to sell, us down the river.

Glenn Greenwald brilliantly explains the whole scam on Democracy Now!:

Glenn Greenwald: Dems Hiding Behind Filibuster to Justify Political Inaction on Public Option (I’ve included the transcript of the healthcare discussion below)

Greenwald lays out even more fully the Democratic game in this article at Salon:

Salon.com | The Democratic Party’s deceitful game

And this: Healthcare Summit Ends in Deadlock; Single-Payer Advocates Excluded

(After nearly seven hours of televised debate, President Obama’s so-called bipartisan healthcare summit ended Thursday without any substantive agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance. We speak to Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor Trudy Lieberman and pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program. [includes rush transcript] )

Democracy Now! transcript of discussion with Glenn Greenwald 2/24/10:

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama is holding a bipartisan summit on healthcare today as he tries to keep his overhaul effort alive. The talks are expected to stretch on for six hours and will be televised on C-SPAN. The White House has invited twenty-two high-ranking lawmakers to the meeting at Blair House, across the street from the White House. The four topics on the agenda are revamping insurance, cost containment, expanding coverage, and the impact of healthcare legislation on deficit reduction.

The Obama administration is holding the summit amid renewed criticism over its refusal to push for a public option under healthcare reform. President Obama omitted the public option from a healthcare proposal unveiled this week.
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said “there isn’t enough political support” to pass a public option through Congress.

ROBERT GIBBS: We have seen, obviously, and I talked about this some yesterday, that though there are some that are supportive of this, there isn’t enough political support in a majority to get this through. The President wanted to find-took the Senate bill as the base and looks forward to discussing consensus ideas on Thursday.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Twenty-three Democratic senators have publicly signed on to supporting a public option, and the White House has been criticized for not attempting to secure the fifty votes needed for simple-majority approval through budget reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Republicans are criticizing Democrats for looking to pass the bill through reconciliation to bypass their efforts to filibuster. Speaking on Fox News, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said it marked the end of minority rights.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: At the end of the day, I want healthcare reform, but I want a Senate that works and slows down bad ideas and sometimes, unfortunately, good ideas. This will be the end of the minority rights in the Senate as we know it, and the casualty of this whole debate would be the loss of the United States Senate as a real viable institution. It will become the House. And no bill is worth that.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the healthcare debate in Washington, DC, we’re joined right here in our New York studio by Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com, author of three books. His most recent, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: Great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond first to Senator Lindsey Graham?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the idea that reconciliation is some sort of unique or exotic instrument in the Senate is just so blatantly false, and it’s not really hard to see why that’s so. Reconciliation is nothing more than a longstanding Senate rule that allows for certain measures to pass with fifty-one votes and can bypass the filibuster.
The Republicans have used reconciliation repeatedly when they were in the majority. In fact, Judd Gregg, in 2005, went to the floor of the Senate and gave a vigorous speech attacking Democrats for the suggestion that there was something inappropriate about it. He said it was just a standard rule of the Senate, it’s nothing more than majority rule.
Many healthcare provisions in the past have been enacted through reconciliation, including COBRA and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

So the idea that there’s something anti-democratic about passing a bill with the support of fifty-one elected senators is extraordinarily Orwellian, and the case of the Republicans’ criticism is incredibly hypocritical.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But the argument that obviously the healthcare legislation is such a huge piece of legislation and involves such a fundamental change in the way that the government provides services to the people, what about that argument that reconciliation should not be used?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think there have been other examples in the past. As I said, COBRA was an extraordinarily significant change to the way in which we provide healthcare coverage, requiring employers to allow continuing coverage after employees leave or are fired. Certainly, the Children’s Health Insurance Program drastically expanded healthcare coverage in the United States. There have been enormous tax cuts for the wealthy under the Bush administration that didn’t have sixty votes, but had fifty votes, and were done through reconciliation, an extraordinary transfer of wealth in this country.
So there’s no magnitude test or any other size requirement, invented now by the Republicans, and by some Democrats, to justify avoiding reconciliation in order to bring real reform.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about President Obama and the public option.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, to me, the way in which the Democrats have conducted themselves concerning the public option is really quite amazing, not because of what they’ve done, but because of how blatant they’re being about it.

The public option, of course, all along was already a compromise from what most progressives wanted, who wanted single payer and were told by most Democratic politicians for a long time that single payer was the optimal course. The public option was already a means of doing nothing other than at least providing some competition to the private health insurance industry. And all year long, Democratic senators and the White House pretended that they were in favor of the public option. They kept insisting, “We’re behind the public option. We want the public option,” even though there was all sorts of evidence that the White House was secretly negotiating with the health insurance industry to make sure that it would be excluded from the final bill.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of evidence?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, they’re the fact that senators ended up saying that in private meetings with the White House, it was made clear to them that the public option was not something that was a priority for the White House and that they would end up happy to see it gone. Health insurance lobbyists were coming in and out of the White House. And the reason they didn’t end up vigorously opposing healthcare reform was because there would be no competition for the private health insurance industry in the form of the public option. And, of course, the final bill didn’t have a public option, and the White House did nothing to support it.

But what’s most incredible was that the excuse that they gave to progressives was that the reason that we couldn’t have a public option was because there were fifty Democratic senators, or fifty-one Democratic senators, who supported it, but there weren’t sixty, and because of the filibuster rule, sadly, the public option just couldn’t get into the bill, and there was just nothing the White House could do, as much as the President wanted that to happen.

Well, now you have a situation where everybody is talking about doing healthcare reform through reconciliation, where only fifty votes, not sixty votes, are required. And what does the President do? He immediately, when he finally unveils his first bill, excludes the public option from the bill, even as he says we’re going to use a process that will only require fifty votes. And you even saw Senator Jay Rockefeller, who spent the year pretending to be so devoted to the public option that he said he will not relent in ensuring that it gets passed, that there is no healthcare reform without a public option, now that it can actually pass and become a reality, he turns around and says, “I’m not inclined to vote for it in reconciliation.”

This is what Democrats do. They use the filibuster rule as an excuse to their supporters to justify their inaction. They’ve been doing this for years. And now that the sham is exposed, because they’re really going to pass healthcare reform with fifty votes, they just turn around and so blatantly say, “Well, actually, we’ve been telling you all year we have fifty votes for a public option. Even now that we only need fifty votes, we’re still not going to do it.” It’s really quite extraordinary.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to ask you about single payer, but first we’re going to break. Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and blogger at Salon.com. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and blogger for Salon.com.
As we talk about the healthcare debate and other issues, I want to read you a quote from Quentin Young, the national coordinator of the National Health-Physicians for a National Health Program. He was talking about the fact that PNHP was not invited to this bipartisan healthcare summit. He said in this quote, “Similarly, requests from Reps. Dennis Kucinich [of Ohio,] Anthony Weiner of New York and Peter Welch of Vermont that single-payer advocates be included in the meeting have apparently gone unanswered.”

There is a lot of hoopla over this being bipartisan. That isn’t to be confused with representing different options.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, one of the things that’s most amazing is that single payer and the public option both poll infinitely better than the healthcare bill itself, than the Senate healthcare bill that the President is advocating. And despite that, what you see all the time when they talk about bipartisanship is shifting the terms of the debate onto, essentially, the right-wing playing field to accommodate Republican views, which basically means there should be no healthcare reform, and excluding views that are to the left of anything that is essentially a conservative idea.

And so, Anthony Weiner and Dennis Kucinich have both been the leading-two of the leading participants in the healthcare debate from the very start, but because they want to move the healthcare debate into the area that’s actually popular, which is providing either single payer or at least a robust public option, they’re excluded from the start. And this is the Democratic White House excluding anything to the left of conservative ideas in defining what the scope of the debate is. And, of course, that’s something that happens in issue after issue.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Glenn, I wanted to ask you about the so-called Obama bill, because it’s really not a bill. I mean, anyone who knows in Congress, the devil is in the details of the actual legislation. And what it is is basically a set of proposals or concepts of how the Senate and the House bill could be reconciled, but it’s not actually a bill that people can pore over and say, “OK, this is really what you stand for.”

GLENN GREENWALD: No, that’s true. I mean, a real healthcare reform would be a stack of papers this high, and all of the proposals thus far have been, in order to reform the healthcare system in the United States. You actually need a bill that had many pages. The Obama proposal, which is really more accurate, as you suggest, is eleven pages long.

Really what it’s designed to do is to signal to the Republicans and to the media that the White House is receptive to doing healthcare reform along the lines of what the Republicans, or at least some Republicans, want, in order to create the appearance of bipartisanship. But you’re right. It’s still not an effort on the part of the White House to play any active role in deciding or helping to determine what the healthcare bill ought to be.