Washington Post: Obama administration backs itself into a corner on government health insurance

The Obama administration has gotten itself in a fix. After vacillating over whether they would offer government health insurance, the Obama administration feels that it must push through that part of the bill. Of course, doing that means that they can't get any Republican votes. The Dems will try to paint that as a Republican problem and claim that they are refusing to be bipartisan. If the Obama administration had simply kept their message straight, this likely wouldn't have happened. The Washington Post has this discussion:

President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority.

Administration officials insisted that they have not shied away from their support for a public option to compete with private insurance companies, an idea they said Obama would still prefer to see in a final bill.

But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on the ways in which insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this." . . .

Republicans signaled Tuesday that dropping the public option would not garner additional GOP backing. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the second-ranking Senate Republican leader, criticized an alternative idea of creating a private insurance cooperative, calling it a "Trojan horse" that was effectively the same as the public option.

"It doesn't matter what you call it, they want it to accomplish something Republicans are opposed to," he said. "There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar bill."

Kyl's comments came as other conservative Republicans joined in to bash the co-ops idea. Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) said "a co-op that is simply another name for a public option, or government-run plan, will be rejected by the American people."

One Democratic strategist involved in coordinating the pro-reform message among many like-minded groups said the Republican response was predictable.

"We were always concerned about leading with our glass jaw," he said. "We felt we probably shouldn't make health-care reform be about this because it falls so easily into the socialized medicine, big-government theme." . . .