[Guest post by DRJ]

From Naked Emperor News, the audio of Howard Dean on The Bill Press Show, November 24, 2009:

Here’s my transcript of the text:

Dean: “I will not vote for a bill … [laughs] I don’t have a vote … but I would not vote for a bill that does not have a public option. Period. Plain and simple.”

Press: “Well, that’s what Bernie Sanders says as well.”

Dean: “Yeah, he’s doing the right thing and I’m hoping there’s going to be 4 or 5 other Senators that will join him.

Look, there is something worse than passing no bill. This bill isn’t very strong. In fact, the only piece of reform left in it is the public option. The insurance reform is gone, essentially, because what they did was they have guaranteed issue — that is, you have to … the insurance company has to insure you — the problem is they don’t have community rating anymore. They … in the Senate bill I think you can charge three or four times as much for sick people as you do for healthy people and in the House bill it’s twice as much.

You know, we did this 15 years ago in Vermont and you can charge 20% more for your most expensive plan as you can for your cheapest plans, and that’s it. Now, you can afford to buy health insurance if it’s only 20% above the bottom price but you can’t afford to buy health insurance if it’s twice as much or three times as much. So guaranteed issue doesn’t do you any good unless you have a real community rating, and real community rating doesn’t exist in either the House or the Senate bills.

So the old argument which I used to make was that we ought to pass this thing just to get the insurance reform. There isn’t any insurance reform left in this bill to speak of.

You know, what this is is a giant bailout. This is a bailout that makes AIG look cheap. Sixty billion dollars a year goes to the insurance companies under this bill. Now if we can get a public option, I think that’s okay. But if you don’t have a public option, why would we want to stick the taxpayers with yet another bailout? They bailed out the banks, they bailed out AIG. This is a trillion dollar bailout.

I would vote with Bernie Sanders. I would vote to kill this bill if it does not have a public option because that is doing harm to the nation. It’s not just “Well, there’s going to be some of this …”. This is a harmful bill to the nation without a public option because it’s going to take trillions of dollars, billions … well, trillions over several decades from our kids.

So Republicans are right about the rhetoric of the bill but if you get reform, you can fix it. If you don’t get reform, you got a system that we have today — you’re gradually going to start un-insuring people because we’re not going to have the money to maintain the system. It does nothing to control costs.”

H/T Hot Air.

— DRJ