Public Plan is Being Swiftboated

Cooperatives don't have "the reach, authority, or desire to drive broadly implemented delivery and payment reforms or act as a strong public-spirited competitor that discourages private insurers from engaging in practices that undermine health security," he wrote.

Hacker and Ellison blamed private insurance companies for creating much of the noise and dissension, and deflecting support for the public plan to a cooperative.

Ellison, vice co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, vowed a fight in what he called a debate with historic importance on a level with the Civil Rights Movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.

"No doubt that the interests on the table are so great, and stakes are so high, there's going to be a fight. It's going to be competitive," Ellison said.  "Before we went on break, there was a general sense of a great level of confidence that the public option was going to be law one day.

"Then we left, and all of a sudden the other side, the side that wants the status quo, the side that profits from the status quo and the side that survives based on the status quo, they had their say, and we should not have been surprised."

But he predicted that with voices like Hacker's, and the support of the 60 members of Congress who have pledged to not vote for health reform without a public option, they will "break up these monopolistic and oligopolistic healthcare markets around the country."

Hacker added, "We want reform to work. And that means–above all–making sure that those who got us into this mess, mainly large for-profit private insurers who have gotten larger and larger since the failure of the Clinton health plan in the early 1990s, and which are not facing competition in most parts of the country, don't get to decide what reform is and don't get to keep doing what they're doing today."