"If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote. I believe that more debt will lead us into a greater Recession."
Joe Lieberman slams Public Option; brushes off critics
Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any health care bill with a Public Option could kill health reform this year — and embolden Democratic challengers who’d like to send him packing in 2012.
But Lieberman doesn’t seem worried.
“I don’t think about that stuff,” Lieberman told POLITICO this week. “I’m just — I’m being a legislator. After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.”
Lieberman left the Democratic Party in 2006 after liberal Ned Lamont beat him in Connecticut’s Democratic Senate primary. Lieberman defeated Lamont in the general election and returned to Washington as an independent, where he continues to caucus with Democrats — even though he accuses them of engaging in a bit of bait and switch when it comes to the public option.
“It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.
“It suddenly becomes a litmus test. I thought Democrats were against litmus tests.”
Despite the strong words against some in his old party, Lieberman still entertains the idea of a reunion. Asked this week if he might run again as a Democrat in 2012, Lieberman smiled and said, “Yeah, sure.”
“I’m for health care reform,” Lieberman told POLITICO. “And, of course, this will all be over by then, and I hope we will be strongly supporting health care reform. I haven’t changed my thoughts about 2012, which is, I’m keeping all my options open.
“The wonderful thing of being an independent: You have options.”
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), No. 4 in the Senate GOP leadership, said if Lieberman wants to become a Republican, he “would be welcomed, and there would be a real effort to make him feel at home.”
But when it comes to the Democratic Party, political experts and polls suggest that Lieberman’s options may be more limited.
“My sense is that when he announced he would filibuster the public option, he was saying goodbye to the Democratic Party,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University poll in Hamden, Conn. “My sense is, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
In a new Quinnipiac poll, Connecticut voters said by a 2-to-1 margin that Lieberman’s views on the issues put him closer to Republicans than to Democrats. And just 12 percent of the respondents said he should run as a Democrat if he runs again in 2012; 55 percent said he should remain an independent, while 20 percent said he should cross over completely and run as a Republican.
In an interview, Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, said he’s getting more encouragement from Democrats in Connecticut to consider a challenge to Lieberman in 2012. A February Quinnipiac poll found that Blumenthal would beat Lieberman by a 28-point margin.
A September Research 2000 poll found that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell would defeat both Blumenthal and Lieberman in a potential three-way 2012 matchup; the same poll found that 68 percent of the state’s voters support the public option.
Blumenthal has long signaled an interest in the seat and may have an opening now that Lamont appears to be prepared to run for governor and Rell has announced she won’t seek a third term next year.
Blumenthal said he was first focusing on his own reelection bid in 2010 before “considering other options” for the 2012 cycle.
“I’m disappointed by his threat to filibuster and effectively kill all health reform,” said Blumenthal, adding that there have been “depths and breadths” of anger at Lieberman over his position on the public option.
Democratic strategists in the state said that Blumenthal may not be alone in sensing an opportunity against Lieberman, with some also pointing to two-term Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) as a potential challenger.
George Jepsen, a former state party chairman and former state Senate majority leader, said that Lieberman may be attempting to endear himself to GOP voters, since he could potentially win in 2012 by picking off 75 percent of Republican voters, about half of the independent vote and about one-quarter of Democrats.
“He’s really burned every bridge in sight,” Jepsen said of Lieberman’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
Lieberman, the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, campaigned for Republican John McCain in 2008 and criticized Democrat Barack Obama on foreign policy issues. Sympathetic Democrats have long insisted that Lieberman is an important ally on domestic issues. But by vowing to block a vote on the public option, he has distanced himself from the party on a key domestic policy front.
Lieberman said it’s the “wrong time” to create a government insurance program, claiming it would increase the national debt, probably raise taxes and increase premiums for insurance holders.
But Democrats said that Lieberman is employing GOP talking points in distorting the virtues of a public option, noting it’s the one entity that could control costs — by adding a major new provider to the marketplace that would force private insurers to reduce their costs. And while other centrist senators have expressed reservations about the public option, no Democrat has gone so far as to threaten a filibuster, which could only be defeated with 60 votes.
Lieberman said he won’t block efforts to begin the debate, but he will filibuster a public option to end the debate.
The Public Option in the real world
Like many other doctors, I've been looking at my panel of patients and trying to decide whether a "public option" in health reforms will help them. Unfortunately, I can't think of a single patient where it will.
As an internist, I have a varied practice, with patients ranging from rich to poor, from chronically ill to "worried well." On any given day, I see at least one quarter of cases (including Medicaid patients) without charge; one or two come in without insurance and pay me cash. Most of the time, I accept the patient's HMO or Medicare without looking closely at how much I get paid.
The biggest problem I'm having now is the shrinking network of doctors to refer my patients to for procedures or specialty evaluations. The public option won't help here — and could make things worse.
All the health-reform bills include hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and/or Medicaid payments to hospitals and physicians; inevitably, more and more of my colleagues will decline to play ball with public insurance. And if there is a public option, the private HMOs will have to cut their reimbursements to us in order to compete — so that more doctors will drop out of private insurance, too.
My patient Jeff (not his real name) works part-time as a janitor and doesn't quite qualify for Medicaid. He has catastrophic-type insurance with a high deductible that doesn't cost him very much but covers serious illness. I see him for his high blood pressure and charge him a minimal amount.
A bit of a hypochondriac, Jeff calls me often for reassurance, which I happily give. He'd likely qualify for a public option — and be liberated to go to the emergency room for a minor complaint whenever I was unavailable, which he's reluctant to do right now. (After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, similar unnecessary visits to the ER rose.)
My patient Celine is a 50-year-old administrative assistant at a small advertising firm. She can barely afford her share (about half) of the premiums for her basic, no-frills HMO coverage. With a troubling family history of breast cancer, she's comforted by the idea that a public option would provide better, cheaper insurance than she has now. But I worry that her employer might be more inclined to "dump" insurance — and that the public-option insurance will prove unacceptable to the doctors she's used to seeing, just as Medicaid is.
After all, Celine's HMO is still useful — I can find her a gynecologist I trust to give her routine exams, an excellent gastroenterologist to perform her screening colonoscopy and a radiologist to do her yearly mammogram. "Be careful what you wish for," I tell her.
I have discussions with my patients every day about the health reforms before Congress.
A patient who's moving to Nevada doesn't understand why she can't keep the low-cost insurance she has. If insurance were portable, she says, there could be more competition. The public option might provide portability, I tell her — if you qualify, and it's available in both the states you're moving between. More important, it's unlikely to provide coverage much better than Medicaid. There are better ways to get portability — starting with reforms to let people buy insurance across state lines, the way large companies do now for their employees.
Another patient, reaching 65 and considering retirement from his accounting firm, fears that Medicare will soon lose its purchasing power, that resources will be shifted away from it to pay for the public option. "Bad time to be 65," he says.
The problem is worse than he thinks: I have to admit to him that, if I can no longer order the tests and treatments I think will help him, I might have to drop out of Medicare myself.
"I'll continue to see you for a minimal charge," I tell him. But he isn't comforted by that — focusing instead on the promise he thinks the government made to him 40 years before.
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Sources: Politico, CBS News, Fox News, NY Post, Firedoglake, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps
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