Facing criticism that his mind has been elsewhere, Sen. Bill Nelson has finally given his talk about Chinese drywall, snakes, space, and Chinese snakes in space a rest to address the nationally pressing concern of health reform.
The man does sit on the Senate Finance Committee after all, which yesterday released its own "bipartisan" bill that omits a public option. Nelson isn't one of the so-called Gang of Six that hashed out the details of the plan, though he has taken credit for helping to prepare the bill
Dropping a public option won't please progressives or, according to a new survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors either.
Nelson has now emerged as a supporter of co-op plans, and while talking to the St. Pete Times seems to denigrate the intelligence of supporters of the public option.
Nelson said most of the public option advocates "don't have a clue" about what it would take to create such a plan.
"The whole thing is so complicated you can't expect them to understand.""If a co-op serves the same purpose, what's the big deal?" Nelson added.
I suspect that the 63 percent of doctors who support a public option indeed have a clue, probably more so than Nelson. Plus, it doesn't seem any more likely that most people have much of a clue what a health-care co-op is. The AP has a rundown on the issue here.
