Liberals urge Obama to keep public option

The liberal backlash is already starting.

Seeking Republican support for its healthcare overhaul, the White House suggested over the weekend that it would be open to dropping the so-called public option -- a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers and keep them honest on price and quality.

The Obama team hinted that it would consider a nonprofit health cooperative -- being proposed by key senators -- as an alternative to a government plan.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic Party chief during last year's campaign, urged the president today to stay firm with a public option.

"You can't really do health reform without it," Dean, a leader of the party's liberal wing, said on morning news shows. He called a direct government role "the entirety of health care reform."

On MSNBC, Dean said this afternoon that a while a few small coops have worked in places like Washington state, "it doesn't work" nationally.

The problem, he said, is it was tried in the form of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which started as a nonprofit and which now acts like a private insurer.

Without a public option, the overhaul bill would just funnel more money to an industry that has acted "abominably," Dean said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi renewed her support for a public option, quoting Obama's own words.

“As the President stated in March, ‘The thinking on the public option has been that it gives consumers more choices and it helps keep the private sector honest, because there's some competition out there.'

“We agree with the President that a public option will keep insurance companies honest and increase competition," Pelosi said in a statement. "There is strong support in the House for a public option.  In the House, all three of our bills contain a public option, as does the bill from the Senate HELP Committee. A public option is the best option to lower costs, improve the quality of health care, ensure choice and expand coverage. The public option brings real reform to lower costs over the 10-year period of the bill.”

Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who has compared leaving private insurers in charge to "making a pyromaniac the fire chief," predicted that the bill won't win a majority in the House without the public plan.

"I would love to be one of the big supporters of the Obama plan, but I've got to know that it includes a public option." he said this afternoon on CNN.

"Look, the president has to lead on this and he has to say very clearly a public option is important that we could -- that we hold these insurance companies accountable and provide some competition," Weiner added. "I would love to be the one carrying the ball for him, but unless he says a public option is the way to go, I'm going to be a no and so will a lot of people."

Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, weighed in with his own statement:

"A public option is a fundamental part of ensuring health care reform brings about real change. Opposing the public plan is an endorsement of the status quo in this country that has left tens of millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured and put massive burdens on employers.  I have heard too many horror stories from my constituents about how the so-called competitive marketplace has denied them coverage from the outset, offered a benefit plan that covers everything but what they need or failed them some other way.  A strong public option would ensure competition in the industry to provide the best, most affordable insurance for Americans and bring down the skyrocketing health care costs that are the biggest contributor to our long-term budget deficits. I am not interested in passing health care reform in name only.  Without a public option, I don't see how we will bring real change to a system that has made good health care a privilege for those who can afford it.”

The AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation that has been a loyal Obama ally, also said it would "forcefully" urge the White House and Senate to keep the public option in the bill.

"A quality public health insurance option is a crucial part of health care reform to keep private insurance companies honest, hold down costs and ensure that everybody has a health care choice available. Key to holding down costs for families, for businesses, and for the federal budget is forcing insurance companies to compete. And the only way to force real competition on the insurance companies is a strong public plan option," president John Sweeney said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, the usual suspects opposed to reform are trying to hijack the reform process and attacking the public health insurance plan option because they are afraid of competition and they want to keep gouging working families. But unless we take decisive steps to stop the crippling rise of health costs, we will have squandered this moment of opportunity."

UPDATE: Though many observers heard a change in the language that Obama used at a town hall on Saturday and that Sebelius used, the White House insisted today that Obama's position had not shifted significantly.

"His preference is a public option," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Air Force One returning from the president's four-day Western trip. "If there are other ideas, he's happy to look at them....I think this is true not only for the issue of health care, but for virtually every other issue that he'll ever deal with in public life is he has goals about what he wants to accomplish and he's not necessarily wedded to only one way of getting there. I think he's said that a hundred times."

Gibbs added, "I challenge you guys all to go back and see what we've said about this over the course of many, many, many, many months, and you'll find a boring consistency to our rhetoric."

Republicans, meanwhile, are not welcoming the possible concession.

Instead, the Republican National Committee sent out a list of comments from Democrats to back up its case that co-ops could be a disguise for another form of the public option.

" 'Public option' by any other name is still government-run health care," the RNC said, adding that the reports of the demise of the public option are "greatly exaggerated."

Still, the issue could divide the Democratic coalition that has been united behind Obama on health care.

Even as Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, was saying on CNN Sunday that the public option was not an "essential element" for reform, the Democratic National Committee was all over Dick Armey, a former House Republican leader and now head of the conservative group FreedomWorks, for saying on NBC that a government insurance option would amount to tyranny.

"If you give a government program and let me choose to be in or choose to be out, that's generosity. If you force me in, irrespective of my desires, that's tyranny," Armey said.

DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse responded, “If Dick Armey thinks government involvement in health care is tyranny, he must be forgetting or ignoring the fact that Medicare is a government plan that has been praised as one of the most successful programs ever -- a plan which is popular among seniors and runs better and with lower administrative costs than virtually any private insurance plan. If Republicans like Dick Armey are going to continue to rail against government involvement in health care, they should come forward to call for the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid and if not, just admit that their rhetoric is just part of their political strategy to 'break' the President and derail reform.”