Say Anything Blog

Or is the state Democrat party just out of touch with mainstream North Dakotans?  I suspect it’s the latter.  Senator Kent Conrad’s pragmatic embrace of his “co-ops aren’t the public option” charade shows that he understands how most North Dakotans feel about government health care.  But that hasn’t stopped North Dakota democrats from stamping about impotently and demanding that Conrad support a public option anyway.

In a move that seems designed to push Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) on health care reform, the North Dakota Democratic Party voted two weeks ago to make the public option for insurance coverage a stated objective of its platform.

At a little-noticed policy committee meeting on September 19, state Democratic officials passed a resolution affirming their commitment to “universal single payer health care legislation.” As a fallback option, the resolution read, the officials supported the creation of a government-run plan for insurance.

In an effort to apply the pressure to their representatives in Congress, the party also sent letters to the offices of Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, as well as Rep. Earl Porneroy, alerting them to the passed resolution. ...

A member of the North Dakota Democratic Party said that the resolution was a statement of principle on health care reform that reflected the overwhelming consensus among Democrats in the state. “No one voted against it,” said Chad Nodland, who sits on the executive committee for the state party. “And by the end of the meeting there were probably 60 to 75 people still there.”

First, let’s be clear that the North Dakota Democrat party isn’t going to make too much noise about this.  With a full 80% of the state party’s funding coming from big-money, out-of-state contributors who launder their cash through PAC’s run by Senator Conrad and his colleagues Senator Dorgan and Representative Pomeroy they aren’t about to bite the hand that feeds.

They’ll make a little noise about it so they can pretend like they still stand for certain principles, but ultimately they know that if someone like Kent Conrad just came out and started acting like a liberal he’d be cast aside pretty quickly by mainstream voters.

But second, these idiots need to realize that the policies on health care Conrad is actually pursuing are basically what they want.  Co-ops are the public option by another name, and when coupled with the sort of regulations on the health care market as a whole that liberals like Conrad are proposing they’ll be pretty much the only option for most Americans.

And when enough Americans are herded onto the co-ops it will be an easy trick for the government to just nationalize the co-ops so that we get the sort of government health care they want.

These liberals want “universal health care” now.  Conrad does too, but he’s playing the long game.