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FDR, says NYTimes, knew how to make the case for public option

by Susan Marie Kovalinsky | December 1, 2009 at 07:36 am

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"The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options. . . " ~ Adam Cohen, New York Times, Dec. 1 , 2009

The public option, says the Times, is not some new innovation in big government takeover.

Instead, it mirrors the quest of FDR to make the case for public power within a crisis:

And President Obama might have done far better in the FDR spirit:

As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt crusaded for “public power,” government-owned electric plants. He was outraged by the high prices that monopolistic utility companies were charging and by their refusal to bring electricity to rural parts of the state, which, they said, could not be done economically. Public plants, Roosevelt said, could bring power to those who needed it and serve as a yardstick for measuring and keeping in check the prices charged by private power companies.

Many decades later, a major point of contention in the debate over health insurance reform is the so-called public option, a government-run program that would compete with private insurers. Critics have tried to paint it as a wild-eyed experiment, but it echoes F.D.R.’s battles for public power — in fact, the entire New Deal he later created. The argument Roosevelt made — that a government program could fix the flaws in a poorly functioning private market — applies with even more force in health care.