From the mouth of Howard Dean . . .

This is not some right-wing Republican “tea-bagger” or whatever – this is Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and former Democratic National Committee chairman – who also happens to be a medical doctor – and this is about the harshest critique of the proposed health care bill that I’ve heard from anyone:

I am not opposed to health care reform, and in fact welcome it, but this bill is not the answer.

*Update: To be fair, this also famously came out of the mouth of Howard Dean:

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “From the mouth of Howard Dean . . .”

  1. James Johnson Says:
    November 29, 2009 at 2:27 am

    Am I missing something? He’s clearly criticizing the bill because it lacks a public option and is not progressive enough. Are you supporting the public option now?

    • Henry Webb Says:
      November 29, 2009 at 2:45 pm

      I have always said that if they are going to reform health care, they need a public option. Otherwise it becomes exactly what Howard Dean said it has become – a bailout for the insurance industry. It makes no sense to me to mandate that all Americans buy insurance without giving them a cheaper option – especially since they also eliminated the community rating requirement, meaning that insurance companies can charge dramatically more for people with preexisting conditions.

      Without the public option, this bill does nothing but benefit the insurance industry – now everyone has to buy insurance, their only option is to buy it from the private insurance industry, and the industry (while they must now cover people with preexisting conditions) can charge a perhaps prohibitively more expensive amount to cover such preexisting conditions. It’s a joke.

      But the biggest joke is that the Obama administration has gotten itself into a jam from which I don’t see a way out. It has staked so much political capital on getting health care reform passed that it has to see something passed. But this current bill is garbage, and if it is passed, people are going to end up paying considerably more for insurance with no public option. So the Obama administration is going to be blamed for the consequences of this bad bill.

      If I were Obama, I would kill this bill and say that he is going to step back and reconsider this issue and revisit health care with the white house, not congress, taking the lead on crafting the bill. While doing so would cost him politically, I think the fallout would be less than if the Democrats are saddled with responsibility for this terrible bill.

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