"Healthcare Reform's Best—and Last—Shot"

"Criticism of the Obama administration gained momentum through 2009, and even became strangely vogue among economists and columnists who were widely thought to be on the president’s side. It was in this context that voices who had lionized Obama—from seasoned pragmatists like Robert Reich (who blurbs Starr’s book) to MoveOn.org—spoke of the 'public option' as the holy grail, and of Obama as its perfidious guardian. Perhaps it was the magical word 'public,' or the vague sense that Obama, having worked to salvage banks and restructure the car companies, was now protecting the profits of insurance companies. Perhaps it was the way this insinuation was magnified by the charge that the members of Obama’s economic team were mostly disciples of Robert Rubin, thus to blame for deregulating investment banking and causing the financial crisis in the first place. Perhaps it was the way Obama’s half-heartedness about a public plan, which he knew the Senate would never give him, suggested timidity. In any case, Obama’s left critics now lambasted him. Former DNC chair Howard Dean declared in November 2009 that without the public option 'this bill is worthless and should be defeated'—not grounds for drug testing, perhaps, but possibly for prescribing some Xanax."

Bernard Avishai in The Nation reviews Paul Starr's Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform.