Dean has been fighting for aspects of universal care for over a decade; he tried to get a phase in of something like Medicare in his own state. Jason is working hard for a coalition that is trying to extract as much reform as they think they can out of this session of Congress. Maybe their political judgement was right; maybe wrong.

Right now, it’s looking a little ambitious, given where the debate is going. But I’m having to spend time defending decent people from charges they’re dishonest, while the political discourse in America is focused on whether it’s legitimate under the 10th Amendment for the US government to do much of anything on health care, even the existing Medicare program, let alone an expansion, and if it’s not Constitutional, whether it’s okay to shoot the President.

Somehow I don’t think the problem with the health care debate is about Howard Dean and Jason. I don’t work for either of them (or anyone else here), but if you attack decent people, I’ll defend them.

If you did not intend that interpretation, it’s simple enough to say so.

I also agree there is nothing further to be gained from this conversation, since we seem to interpret language differently.

it is an especially aggravating statement because there have been other reports of hcan reps conflating single payer with public option. for example, here is a youtube from just about a week before the quote i linked to @90.

p.s. fwiw, i do not read kip’s post or comments as you do (for example w/ my bold, as you wrote, “… everyone who has been considering this public option by choice approach was therefore engaged in a “bait and switch”). maybe it’s a misunderstanding? i have a vague memory of you and i having a similar misunderstanding. actually iirc it was my misunderstanding — you had i think written something along the lines of “the somebodies-but-i’ve-forgotten-who” and i misunderstood the “the” to indicate you meant “all” and not “some.” anyway, i think it’s an easy thing to misunderstand.

It seems to me we can boil our issues down to two statements. I’ll set them out below, and you tell me if you agree with them.

(1) There is a difference between urging PO advocates not to support the POs in tne Senate HELP Comm bill and HR 3200 and accusing PO advocates of deception.

(2) People who deceive others sometimes, perhaps often, do not start out with the intention to deceive.

Can we agree these statements are true? If you can’t agree to them, then I don’t know what to suggest. Perhaps you should ask ten friends what they think and let us know what you find out. If you disagree with these statements, then I think we should agree we have wrung as much meaning out of this conversation as we’re going to get and close it up. Thanks.

Kip

I don’t think there’s any doubt Dean understands the concepts, the terms and the politics. He’s trying to sell a concept he believes is worthwhile and that could become something like Medicare. He also believes it would lay the ground work for single payer. At NN09, he also made clear that he would prefer to see Medicare gradually opened up, by lowering the age eligibility. So you have someone who believes in single payer, supports opening Medicare, and in the meantime, if the latter aren’t possible, wants a public option that people can choose that would be like Medicare. And now he’s dishonest?

In that post and in your comments here, you have criticized advocates of a public option without qualifying who you meant, other than “advocates,” which left the impression, which you still haven’t corrected, that anyone who advocates a public option deserves the same criticism. In your comment at 84, you continue that.

Further, you say “I strongly disagree with lots of people over many issues, but I don’t accuse them of duplicity and lack of integrity. I just argue that they are wrong or inaccurate in as civil a tone as I can muster.” All unqualified statements. But that is immediately followed by a personal attack on Professor Hacker for duplicity and being unethical, and you repeat the bait and switch terms, even though you acknowledge that perhaps Hacker “didn’t deliberately set out” to perform a bait and switch.

You can’t have it both ways.

Jacob Hacker is not here to defend himself. There are lots of ideas that are proposed in concept for legislation, backed by papers explaining them in detail. Hacker wrote a paper doing just that. Then the ideas enter the legislative process and when they come out, they often look very different from the original idea. That doesn’t make anyone, including Jacob Hacker, dishonest or unethical. It just means you can’t control what happens in Congress.

Moreover, Hacker may well believe that retaining the concept, even in a limited, scaled back version in the current bills, is better than not having the concept at all, not because he believes the scaled down version would succeed by itself, but because he can envision a scenario in which the concept is improved, grows and becomes the viable approach he originally envisioned. But he could easily conclude that complaining about what happened to his paper is not necessarily the best strategy for keeping the concept alive in Congress. That’s not being dishonest.

i do though wish the dishonest, misleading, etc statements were getting called out by other public option advocates (instead of single payer advocates who are dismissed as biased or having an axe to grind, etc). sometimes the silence, if widespread, can appear to be, even if it’s not, complicity or agreement.

* note: i hate the use of “some” without naming names, so here are a couple of likely candidates i was just thinking about (there are a lot more). 1) darcy burner sent out a fund raising letter on july 27 that included the line, “The current House bill includes the robust public option demanded by the Congressional Progressive Caucus…” and 2) another one from jason rosenbaum: “Health care has to pass this year, and what’s moving is a public option. As Howard Dean says, it’ll allow you to choose a single payer system if you want one.”

I see absolutely no way that what you think will happen, will happen if health care is reformed. You are living in some dark world I don’t wish to look at too closely.