Conservatives Sunny About the Public Option (No, Really!)

Two weeks ago, I imagined a parallel health care universe. Now I seem to be living in it. The only people who are more dead-set that the insurance industry against giving Americans the choice between private insurance and a high-quality public health insurance option, modeled on the reliability of Medicare, are Republicans. So why is it that the most positive things said today about the public option were by not just run-of-the-mill conservatives, but conservative icons?!

Bill Frist was until recently the Senate Majority Leader. He was widely expected to make a 2008 run for president. Since leaving the U.S. Senate to “go back to medicine,” he’s found copious time to serve on boards with a stake in the health care industry, become co-chair (with Tom Daschle) of the bipartisan ONE ’08 campaign, and appear in a commercial for Coke with James Carville. Still, between his years leading a Republican Senate under George W. Bush and his financial interest in the health care industry continuing to be fabulously profitable, you absolutely would not expect him to have a more favorable analysis of the odds for the public option than Democrats. Yet there he is in Fierce Healthcare (an industry newsletter) proclaiming, “There will likely be a public plan as a backup, and they haven't put that out yet, but I predict at the end of the day that that will be part of the plan.” Sure, it’s the public option with a trigger, but still -- Bill Frist, people!

That was shocking enough. But then Bill O’Reilly, of all people, nearly caused me to go into cardiac arrest with this doozy of a statement: “I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have an option, that if they don’t like their health insurance, if it’s too expensive, they can’t afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.” Don’t take my word for this -- watch the video.

What... the... hell.

Now granted, O’Reilly is also convinced the public option is dead, so perhaps he feels somewhat liberated to admire it. And it's not clear if he understand the difference between the Health Exchange and a public option (he sure seems to be describing the latter). But I’ve also always thought the Republican Party doth protest too much on the public option. After all, economist Jacob Hacker’s idea was that public and private would be in dynamic tension based on competition, to the improvement of both times of insurance. Could it be that as we move to the endgame and begin to leave behind some of the name-calling rhetoric and existential opposition to reform, that we’re beginning to actually come together on the notion that private insurance isn’t the automatic answer, and its business practices can’t always be defended?

Maybe. But then again, maybe someone slipped something funky into my coffee and I hallucinated the whole thing. We’ll have to see.

(Image is in the public domain.)