One reason why so many people find it difficult to enthusiastically advocate for health care reform is that we still don’t know which bill and which proposals are being included and which not. The details matter.

In How the PUBLIC OPTION Measures Up to “A Faith-Inspired Vision of Health Care.” (downloadable PDF, from Faithful Reform in Healthcare, and we also posted the text here), we find an assessment from a spiritual progressive perspective of some of the key elements in what a “public option” might look like as articulated in one of the bills with greatest support.

It remains to be seen whether the actual health care bill that emerges from Congress will have this kind of a public option or not–because it is quite possible to imagine a “public option” remaining in the health care bill, but it being eviscerated even further than it has so far.

At a labor day rally in California, some of the more progressive Congresspeople lamented that they had already made major compromises by abandoning the “Single Payer” or “Medicare For All” proposal in order to satisfy the “realists” in Washington, D.C. but did not want to support a health care proposal that didn’t at least have this public option. There was no public discussion, so it was not possible to ask them whether this had not already been a major strategic mistake, because having abandoned “Medicare for All” they now may find themselves pushed to abandon elements of the “public option” that make it valuable. In any event, it is important that we, the constituents, know enough to be able to see what a “public option” might include and to what extent it corresponds with our own vision of what a spiritual progressive ought to be seeking.

So please share this information as widely as possible and use it to assess both what President Obama calls for and what the Congress actually faces once there is a bill that passes both Houses and then finds a reconciliation between the two Houses in a “conference committee report” that becomes the final bill to be voted on.

At that point, we have to assess whether a severely compromised bill is better than no bill at all–that is, whether we should seek to start over again and insist on Medicare For All, or whether we think that the compromise that emerges is a valuable first step and not a step that actually will have the impact of closing further possibilities for the kind of health care consistent with our own highest religious, spiritual and ethical values.


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