Obama fails to mention his public health care plan

What these health care companies essentially want is to do away with intense government regulations and oversight, and also to avoid a public plan. To those who say, "but they promised to control costs themselves." Sure. Maybe briefy, maybe in superficial ways. But make no mistake, this is an attempt to undermine real health care reform, not to contribute to it.

As Paul Krugman notes in an op-ed today:

What’s presumably going on here is that key interest groups have realized that health care reform is going to happen no matter what they do, and that aligning themselves with the Party of No will just deny them a seat at the table. (Republicans, after all, still denounce research into which medical procedures are effective and which are not as a dastardly plot to deprive Americans of their freedom to choose.)

I would strongly urge the Obama administration to hang tough in the bargaining ahead. In particular, AHIP will surely try to use the good will created by its stance on cost control to kill an important part of health reform: giving Americans the choice of buying into a public insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers. The administration should not give in on this point.

Krugman is surely right. If the Administration caves on the creation of a public plan, then in the long run NO real health care reform will come to pass. And what disturbs me is that Obama was full of prais in this press conference for the health are industry, but did not say anything about a public plan.

This makes me very uneasy. I fear that Obama - who is extremely prone to comprimise - will simply turn reform over to the health care industry and drop the public plan. Let's hope I'm wrong. But today's speech was not encouraging.