So President Obama has jettisoned the public option right on cue.  The pivot is being portrayed in the press as an effort to salvage ObamaCare from ferocious opposition to the public option from the right, which is true but it is not the whole explanation of what Obama is doing and why he is doing it.  

This move is not occurring in a panic, as some pundits would have people believe.  This political pivot has long been contemplated within the White House as part of the Administration’s strategy to devise a healthcare package acceptable to the insurance industry, which in turn the President hopes will provide a “compromise” conservatives can live with.  The trick is to do so without so alienating the left wing of his own party that he gets mouse trapped in the middle.

This strategy also explains the devious “insurance baiting” the White House engages in.  Like Pavlov’s dogs, conservatives have been conditioned to rally to the defense of insurance companies (the “private sector”) when the President whacks them one.  This is all political theatre designed to manipulate conservatives.  It is the bait; the switch will come when big insurance companies and the White House bury the hatchet and agree to a “compromise.”  The White House is depending upon the “private sector” to convince conservatives to get on board.  After all, the President is pulling together the strands of a reform compromise designed along the lines many Republican politicians have supported in the past.  (We predicted this all earlier here and here.)

If you want to understand why the big insurance companies are in bed with President Obama to “reform” healthcare, read this excellent description of the banking cartel at work.  (Republican politicians would call it a “public-private partnership” between big banks and the federal government; everyone else would call it what it is:  a government maintained banking cartel.)

Why does reading something about the banking cartel help explain what Obama and the insurance companies are up to?  Read this explanation, which details how ObamaCare would expand the existing state-based insurance market carving (a form of cartel) into a genuine national health-insurance cartel. 

Fans of this website may remember my July 15 commentary, which I wrote after it dawned on me that behind the scenes President Obama had adopted Republican thinking on how to expand federal middleclass entitlements under the guise of “healthcare reform.”  Here are some excerpts of that earlier blog:

Now comes an article from the London Financial Times that demonstrates what I have been saying about ObamaCare, namely it will end up being a fascist (“public/private partnership”) scheme modeled on the Republican blueprint for the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.  (Listen to my description of how this is unfolding at about three fourths of the way through this radio interview.)

As the Financial Times columnist observes:

“Once you take away the proposed public insurance option, which Mr. Obama’s aides have signaled they will drop in final negotiations, the likely outcome is an affordable (sic) reform that embraces Mitt Romney’s blueprint from Massachusetts and funds it with John McCain’s best idea [for a tax increase] from the presidential campaign.  Only in America can you co-opt Republican thinking and have critics label you ‘socialist.’” 


I would certainly agree that it is not exactly correct to characterize what Republicans created in Medicare Part D, what McCain and Romney had in mind for healthcare reform and Obama’s version of them both as “socialism.”  They really are versions of fascism in which the national government essentially takes over segments of the private sector and deploys private property and private businesses to the national government’s purposes in the name of the “national interest” and the “greater good.”  When you are the government, you don’t have to own a company’s stock to own its soul.  Mussolini taught us that. 

But the point here really isn’t to quibble over the definition of political concepts.  It is to point out the obvious that Obama’s “change we can believe in” turns out to be just a more radical version of change we already had been undergoing under Republican rule.  Which brings to mind the humorous 19th century joke about political parties:   “The political parties are like two carriage drivers both racing to the same destination in separate carriages splashing mud all over each other as they go.”

So President Obama has gone over to the Red Side, co-opting Republican thinking on the sneakiest ways to take over everything.  It’s the same old corporatist thinking that was been embraced by big-government Republican apologists throughout the 20th century.

While these backroom maneuverings are taking place, the White House demonizes insurance companies in public and the insurance companies in turn rail against the public-option government competition.  Methinks both sides doth protest way too much in order to divert the public’s attention while the real dirty deed is being performed under the sheets inside the White House.  Rule number one in Washington:  One’s loudest critics are frequently also his best friends.