Yesterday, I posted that the folks in the White House had no balls because of their hands off attitude toward the public option in healthcare reform.

Scarecrow at FDL has an alternate theory, and current behavior does not make it seem far fetched, that the White House is actively opposed to a public insurance option, either because they cut a secret deal with the insurance companies, or because these people are profoundly afraid of real change:

It is hard to avoid the fear that this White House has now become a principal obstacle to getting meaningful health care reform. It claims it wants major cost reductions in Medicare, via a semi-autonomous cost-cutting commission. But the White House has already bargained away the savings it can achieve from most of the major providers: PhRMa ($80 billion), hospitals ($155 billion) so they can give it back to the doctors (for whom AMA is demanding $240+ billion more over ten years in relief from automatic Medicare reductions).

Why should we not also believe that the White House has a deal to shield insurers from competition by preventing the creation of a public option in exchange for the insurers agreeing to reforms on guaranteed issue and limited community ratings (with the flexibility Baucus provided) and to support this framework with tv ads? (Read Ignagni’s WaPo op-ed today; while defending the PwC study, she says they made a deal, but Baucus broke it; she didn’t say the deal’s off.)

The White House isn’t taking up most of the chairs in Harry’s Reid’s meetings just to watch him make decisions on his own. They’re there to make sure Harry Reid doesn’t undo the White House deals and wander off the reservation.

(emphasis mine)

If the White House sees healthcare reform as an electoral tool, i.e. that if Barack Obama signs a bill that he can call comprehensive healthcare reform, he can run on in in 2012.

The problem is that the natural result of this, forcing people to buy overpriced health insurance from the insurance parasites, will kill the Democratic Party for a generation.

Karl Rove did not manage to create a permanent Republican majority, but, if this analysis is accurate, it looks like Barack Obama might.