Howard Dean Hails Public Option

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean made an impassioned case for the public option in health care at an incident-free town hall meeting last night while holding the Democratic leadership accountable for not taking full advantage of its majority in both chambers of Congress.

“If you have a majority and you don’t use it, you lose it,” he said. “If we can’t deliver health care, we deserve to lose our majority.”

Dean emphasized that the public option was non-negotiable.

“The single-payer is one position; the present system is another position. What we’re advocating with the public option is the compromise,” he told the mostly middle-aged and elderly Cambridge-area crowd at the First Parish Church at an event sponsored by Harvard Book Store.

“We’re not going to compromise anymore because that is the compromise already.”

Though he avoided calling out the White House as spineless for suggesting compromise, he joked that some “spinal transplants” that he had performed on Democrats in Congress were “rejected.”

During the question-and-answer session, a middle-aged woman pressed Dean on what “rank-and-file” people should do if Obama backs away from the public option.

Dean blamed Obama’s advisers for convincing the president that any health care bill that’s passed would be a victory.

“But a bill without the public option is not victory; it’s defeat,” Dean declared.

The crowd’s frustration with Obama was more palpable. The final questioner simply asked, “Why aren’t you the Secretary of Health and Human Services?”

“I used to wonder about that and worry about that,” Dean said. “But I must say I couldn’t have said any of the kinds of things I said tonight if I were.”

Though Dean lambasted the Democrats’ attempt to include Republicans in the process when they weren’t going to vote for a Democrat-sponsored bill anyway, he made a point of praising the “Blue Dog” Democrats for strengthening what he called “one of the very best parts of this bill”: a provision that the government would help defray small businesses’ health insurance costs.

“We need a few new jobs in this country after Bush got through with us for eight years,” he said, citing that small businesses produce 80 percent of America’s new jobs.

For the most part, Dean hewed to the same argument for efficiency that Obama has been making across the country, rather than presenting the moral case for giving every American decent health care.

He pointed out how the current health care system defeats the free market’s supply-and-demand curve.

“Our system is broken,” said Dean, who is also a licensed physician. “Our incentives are broken. Our mindset is broken.”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu