Why there will be no real health care reform

Taibbi wrote recently about “Obamania” and made some good points, referencing another great post by Glenn Greenwald (Yes, I realize this is a blog post about a blog post by someone else which was in turn about a blog post by someone else. It’s very meta).

Basically, you have people like President Lieberman (I-CT) and President Snowe (R-ME) saying that they won’t vote for the bill unless it’s stripped of anything vaguely resembling real reform, like a public option or a Medicare buy-in. But there’s almost no counterpart to that kind of pressure coming from the left, except for possibly Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

So if the goal of the Obama administration and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership is to simply pass any legislation which they can label as “health care reform” regardless of how neutered it may be – and that seems to be the case – then they have no incentive to cater to progressives who are actually representing the interests of the majority of Americans.  There are no votes in Congress to be lost on that end. There are only votes to be lost on the far right.

Tags: Democrats, health care reform