The dishonesty of Joe Lieberman (updated)

Joe Lieberman was on Fox this weekend discussing why he will filibuster a Senate healthcare reform bill with the public option:

LIEBERMAN: A public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that; I think that would be wrong.
But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt -- $12 trillion today, projected to be $21 trillion in 10 years.

WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you’re a “no” vote in the Senate?

LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today. I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren.

I've met Lieberman, and I can say that unlike some other Senators (Ben Nelson, I'm looking at you), Lieberman is not a stupid man. He also has had some terrific staffers working for him in the past, and I imagine he still does. Consequently, I can only take the factual and logical errors in the snippet above to be pure dishonesty.

The bill coming out of the Senate, with the Public Option, has been scored by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over 1o years. Consequently, if Joe is actually worried about the debt and the deficit, it seems like he would like this feature of the bill. Moreover, the Public Option, by offering competition in states and locations that currently have local monopolists providing health insurance, would lower health insurance costs by providing competition.

The Public Option, as it exists in both the House and Senate bills, would get an initial boost of start-up funding from the government, and then be completely self-sufficient- which means that it's operation would, aside from an initial minimal cost - have zero impact on the national debt.

Joe tries to dress this all up in a "think of the children" kind of way by appealing to what the future will be like under some hypothetical recession brought on by the zero additional debt of the public option. This of course does not take into account the 40 million uninsured Americans, all of whom are somebody's children or grandchildren, and of whom 45,000 a year or so die because of lack of insurance.

On a completely unrelated note, Joe's wife Hadassah is a senior healthcare and pharmaceutical lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton.

*UPDATE- I had originally titled the post "The Perfidy of Joe Lieberman", when a friend noted that the term paired with a Jewish Senator has some negative connotations- see perfidis judaeis. I had no intention to evoke that connotatio- merely pointing out that Lieberman, as one who's caucusing with the Dems and owes his seniority and committee positions to the Democrats, seems particularly treacherous for backstabbing them on healthcare reform using obviously specious reasoning.