Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-ND, wants to set up a government-sponsored national health care cooperative instead of the White House-backed “public option” that has become as welcome to many Americans as the swine flu. But Conrad is like a car dealer trying to resell old clunkers the government just paid him to destroy.

Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee chairman and an avowed proponent of the public option, admitted on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” that Conrad’s co-op proposal is merely “a political compromise, not a policy compromise” designed to lure moderates from both parties into supporting what is for all intents and purposes a public option in disguise. Indeed, former Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt points out in the Wall Street Journal that when Washington “provides the money, names the directors and ultimately pays the bills,” co-op is just another name for a federal takeover of the nation’s health care system.