Weiner: Giving Up Single-Payer Was 'Real Politics'

By Michael McAuliff
November 7, 2009, New York, NY

Published by New York Daily News.

Read Weiner's statement, Waxman's statement, Pelosi's statement and Conyers statement.

Rep. Anthony Weiner says he’s not giving up on a single-payer health care system forever, but stopping the push for it now was the only pragmatic choice.

“I’m disappointed, but this is real politics,” he said, explaining that the vote he was promised on a single-payer system was causing “turbulence” and endangering the reform package.

By turbulence, he meant, among other things, certain Democrats in conservative districts felt they would have to vote for single-payer to keep peace with progressives who put them in office, even though the measure would not pass, then they would have to vote against the reform bill to appease the rest of their constituents.

But Weiner still sees many silver linings in having resurrected the single-payer debate, especially in making it clear that the public option is a compromise for liberals, not the favored option.

“We’ve won a partial victory in that the debates on the the public option have been kind of a weird surrogate debate about single-payer,” he said.

And, in an argument that GOP opponents of single-payer will surely point to, Weiner thinks the public option could be the first step.

“If the public option is a success and it succeeds in reducing costs… it may argue for doing different types of public options in the future,” he said. “This is a laboratory for a goverrment plan, albeit a small one. I think it does help us.”

And he notes that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not withdrawn the promise she made to let him have some sort of vote on single-payer.

“The commitment the Speaker made is still there for me; she still said we’d have this vote and she’s still committed to it,” he said. “This is hopefully just a delay in the stream.”

But the bottom line now is politics. “We did not want to let the perfection of the single-payer be the enemy of the good,” Weiner said.

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