Dean Softens On Senate Health Care Bill: If The GOP Hates It, It Can’t Be So Bad

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Governor Howard Dean raised the ire of the White House and Democratic leaders last week when he publicly denounced the Senate health care bill, and urged liberal members to kill it. Dean’s influence with progressive reformers goes without saying, so members weren’t shy about dismissing his proclamation.

But he seems to have changed his tune.

Here he is on the Rachel Maddow show last night.

So what caused Dean to change his position? An ominous threat from his old rival Rahm Emanuel? A realization that his initial reaction to the death of the public option was informed more by anger than by analysis? No, according to Dean, two things tipped the scales for him. “The first,” he said, “is the bill was improved.”

What the president and the Congress have essentially done is to expand the existing system, not to reform the system. There are a lot of things that have been changed.

There are faults as we talked about last week. In the intervening week, they tightened up the cost control. Money was added for community health centers, for wellness and prevention. They increased doctor reimbursements for rural physicians.

So they`ve done a number of things that will make this approach more likely to work. It also is going to a conference committee with a body that did vote for public option. In my view, in order to have any reform, you`ve got to have a public option.

You`ve got to give Americans a choice between different kinds of system and not just require that we be in the system we already have. That may or may not happen in the House.

The second thing is, honestly, you see the Republicans up there, carrying on the way they are. I basically concluded that, you know, maybe we should just pass this thing. It`s going to take an awful lot of time to work on it. But if the Republicans hate it, there must be some good in it.

Dean also says he remains hopeful that the public option will be reanimated. “Tom Harkin`s right,” Dean said. “You could modify this at a later date. I wish that weren’t necessary. I wish we had that change now. But you could do it later if this doesn’t work out. And I think this 30-year battle with insurance companies over regulation is going to be tough to make it work properly.”

So there you have it.

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