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OK, there’s been a spate of reports about health care and the public option in the last 24 hours, so I wanted to put together a rundown. Exactly who is saying exactly what about what will come out of each chamber of Congress?
The House
Nancy Pelosi reportedly has the votes to pass a robust, Medicare + 5% public option as part of an overall health reform bill. There are some conflicting reports on that, however, and in her press conference today, Pelosi sounded like she was still searching for votes. The office of Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, said that it still looks like there are at least 210 votes for a robust version, and that “momentum is on our side.” There should be some more vote-counting later today.
Anthony Weiner, who raised some eyebrows on Hardball last night by at least giving some good words to the “opt-out” compromise being bandied about in the Senate, was reportedly upbraided in a Progressive Caucus meeting last night. Weiner is not a member of the Progressive Caucus, so I’m not sure if he was there. For their part, Grijalva’s office told me that “The CPC totally disagrees with the opt-out position in any form.”
The Senate
Here’s where it gets more complicated. As we know there are several versions and compromises of the public option, which go all the way from the “level-playing field” approach; to a state opt-out or opt-in, where states would either have to affirm or reject, depending on the version, a public option; to a “trigger” which would only bring about a public option if certain market conditions were not met.
A series of reports today suggested that the White House and Harry Reid were moving toward delivering a public option embedded in the Senate bill that will come to the floor. Ben Nelson said this today, as did Kent Conrad. The version they appear to be talking about, however, is the opt-out version, which picked up support from Jay Rockefeller yesterday. This looks to be the trajectory of the bill.
My personal view is that there are probably ways to design an opt-out that would make it very hard for states to actually take that option, but we have no idea what the opt-out would look like in the states and what the timeline for that would be, nor do we know what public option (although these recent reports refer to a “national” public option) would be the baseline.
Meanwhile there are still roadblocks to this compromised effort. Mary Landrieu blasted the notion of a public option, saying that it would necessarily go bankrupt, which is not true. In addition, this is curious coming from someone who supported Medicare Part D, which was completely unfunded, in contrast to this bill. But she will clearly be a hurdle.
Olympia Snowe pretty much said today that she would join a filibuster of any bill with a public option in it. She also said she did not support the opt-out compromise. This might bring down her poll numbers among Democrats in Maine.
In addition, there are more talks of ConservaDem cabals and meetings over health care. A source forwards me the information that Mark Warner and Tom Carper, two centrists, will be meeting with strong public option supporters Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennet tonight. So while Reid does his thing, there’s a lot of chatter throughout the Senate.
ABC News is reporting that, despite these hurdles, Reid has become convinced he can get 60 votes for cloture on a bill with some form of public option in it. That would mean that, in all likelihood, both bills moving into the conference committee would have a public option. There is a lot of pressure on Reid to deliver on this, and if this news is correct, he appears to be responding. Which of course means that the pressure should continue.
UPDATE: An important addition to that ABC story by Jonathan Karl:
This is not a done deal. I am told that Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) – who worked for months to get Olympia Snowe’s support for the bill and has consistently said a public option cannot pass the Senate – was apoplectic when Reid told him he wanted to include the public option. “Baucus went to DEFCON 1,” said a source familiar with the negotiations, referring to the alert level the military uses for an imminent attack on the homeland.
UPDATE II: Tom Carper says “I think at the end of the day there will be a national plan probably put together not by the federal government but by a non-profit board with some seed money from the federal government that states would initially participate in because of lack of affordability. The question is should there be an opportunity for states to opt out later on and if so, within a year, within two years, within three years?”
If anybody wants to make any sense of that give me a call. One thing I would say, the “seed money from the federal government that states would initially participate in” seems to me to be very good indeed. Those are the kind of carrots that the federal government puts in to make it impossible for the states to opt out in the long run. It’s like when they changed the speed limits in the states by tying it to federal highway funds.
Also, Reid’s office is denying that a final decision has been made.
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About FDL News Desk
this just in . . .
Maine’s AFL-CIO is having their State Convention today – they let Empress Snowe know they are lessed than pleased with her – recessed the Floor for some hot phonebanking action.
Pelosi’s staff takes their whack at the Reid pinata
Thanks Dday–things be moving. Jonathan Karl’s piece reports Reid’s public option as including state opt-out and negotiated prices (unlike Pelosi’s) and karl recently tweeted a “hastily arranged” meeting tonight at WH between senate leadership and Admin.
I think those meetings were planned today already.
This is so maddening and muddled. So much crap is being thrown around and labeled “public option” that it is impossible to reclaim a true definition of the public option anymore. They have successfully watered down the concept. Carper was quoted today saying:
“I think at the end of the day there will be a national plan probably put together not by the federal government but by a non-profit board with some seed money from the federal government that states would initially participate in because of lack of affordability. The question is should there be an opportunity for states to opt out later on and if so, within a year, within two years, within three years?”
This combines opt-out with triggers with co-ops, all in one statement on the public option. What the hell does “not run by the federal government but by a no-profit board” mean? If it is not run by the government and funded by govt. seed money, it is not a “public option”. Rather, it sounds exactly like Conrad’s CO-OPs! But it is being called by TPM a “public option”! WTF!
plum line now has a senior reid aide denying the PO is there. Fog of war…
In one sense, it’s more important just to make sure the option is in there, in some form, on the senate side–and not as an amendment.
It’s going to get screwed with in conference anyway, so the Reid details are not so important at this point. True?
I think that’s accurate.
When you say Pelosi is trying to pass a “robust” PO that’s false isn’t it? That’s what? Her characterisation? But also yours?
This PO would fail to be robust on the grounds of the very limited size of people that could choose it (so it’s not “public” and not an “option” making “robust public option” three lies in three words), as well as other problems.
None of the versions of the PO are robust. They are all so weak as to be failures. It would be best if the entire health care “reform” process fails to produce a bill at this point. So why are you pushing for this nerfed PO as if it was something to celebrate or fight for?
This point was aptly made by Sherrod Brown yesterday:
Reid clearly is proceeding, IMO, to pass anything that can semi-plausibly be described as a public option without provoking the faux-centrists from joining a filibuster. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi appears to be passing a stronger public option in the House, creating the exact dynamic that Sherrod Brown described — and what Obama himself was implicitly looking towards back in August:
That outline of events seems to have held up much better than the hypothesis (frequently presented at FDL, as recently as yesterday) that Obama’s secret goal was to kill the public option.
Killing with faint praise, it’s called–and the praise has indeed been faint from this WH–if that’s what you’d call what Rahm and HHS Sec have been doing regarding the PO, among others. That said, I won’t rehash yesterday’s Scarecrow thread any further.
So Snowe is willing to join a filibuster. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But rather than pass a bill that satisfies Republicans and Blue Dogs, whose approval will mean the bill doesn’t do what we need it to do, I say make them filibuster.
Make Snowe, Baucus, anti-progressives of both parties, stand up in front of their voters and speak out over and over against what those voters clearly want. Keep it on the news for days and weeks.
A bad bill will be a disaster for Democrats. A bill that fails to ease the middle class burden on health care insurance will see the middle turn on the Democratic incumbents.
“Seed money” from the US Government. Just what we need to do: throw more taxpayer dollars into the private sector’s stage and hope that the puppet will manage a merry dance without strings.
What the hell would a new, powerless, not-for-profit accomplish in the face of determined opposition from the first or second most powerful lobby inside the Beltway and in American business? It would be a feel-good experience that would laughably accomplish nothing except to display how this Congress and this president arrogantly dismiss the needs of a large majority of their people and their constituents.