I doubt that the Senate will pass a health care bill with a public option but at least they’re threatening to do so. The Republicans were so convinced that they’d killed all health care reform that they must be trembling in fear. I know the right-wing blogosphere is terrified. At this point, I’ll just be happy if they can expand coverage and reform the insurance industry. I’m more focused on keeping the Republicans out of power than I am in accomplishing anything (not that I see those as divergent goals). Obviously, a bill with a public option would be more popular than a bill without one. Yet, Ezra has a point:
The administration has just spent weeks rebranding itself as a bipartisan outpost in a sea of bickering hacks. Resuscitating the most controversial element of the bill and running it through reconciliation looks less like reaching out and more like delivering a hard left cross to the opposition.
One way or another, however, Senate Democrats and the White House need to choose their path and communicate it clearly. If Democrats want to use the public option to reinvigorate their base and attack the insurers and push this bill over the finish line in a final blaze of populist fury, more power to them. If they decide that the process is fragile and Americans want bipartisanship and this is a bad time to introduce uncertainty into chaos, that makes sense, too.
But it would be murder to leave the public option hanging in the middle of the process with too few votes to pass, too many supporters to kill, and enough bitter controversy that Republicans can just hammer away at Democrats forever and ever and ever. A zombie public option debate could well drag health-care reform into the grave as well.
It does kind of seem like the public option is a zombie. If that scares Republicans…good.
where the hell is this chimera of the electorate wants bipartisanship meme coming from except the beltway insiders?
the absolute best thing, without question, the democRATs could do for their chances in the mid-terms and in 2012 is to pass a decent hrc bill with a strong public option.
the people don’t want bipartisanship they want action. they want to see some of that hope and change coming.
why can’t they see that? they’re going to get pilloried by the RATpublicans no matter what they do.
this whole process has left an extremely foul taste in everyone’s mouth, and the root of it all can be safely lain on obama’s desk, where the buck stops, as it were.
it’s well past time to screw what the RATs and the pundits think, stop making excuses, and do something for the people.
failure is unacceptable.
And it’s also why single-payer should have never been taken off the table … why? .. because single-payer is the Republicans worst nightmare .. and then .. you use single-payer to compromise down from .. why they didn’t do this .. I don’t know .. you don’t start negotiating from the middle point
that was the single biggest mistake of the whole process. but that bridge has been burned.
failure to get even the milquetoast version of the hic [health insurance reform] passed will take it off the table for probably another generation and presage a dismal 2010 election for the dems and probably a one term presidency for obama.
it’s a huge price to pay for the unattainable goal of bipartisanship, eh.
jesus, talk about zombies.
They didn’t campaign on single-payer because it has the support of approximately five senators out of a hundred. Obama would never have won the endorsements of a majority of the senate, never would have won the nomination, and never would have been elected. Having not campaigned on it, he couldn’t use it as a starting negotiating point. That argument is so tired it makes Rip Van Winkle look like a good point.
Meh, he campaigned against a mandate and an excise tax, but he’s putting both in his proposal to bring to the summit.
I don’t necessarily think it was a misstep of the process, but saying he didn’t campaign on it doesn’t hold much water in my view, either, especially when he campaigned AGAINST the aforementioned things above.
Please.
I mean, please.
Single-payer, like HR 676, would be revolutionary. A lack of mandate? An excise tax? Not revolutionary.
I support single-payer in theory. It’s undoubtedly the best system.
But other than Bernie Sanders and Tom Harkin, I am unaware of any Democratic senators who are on the record supporting single-payer. You think Blanche Lincoln is running away from the public option? She’d set the ground on fire running away from single-payer. The tea parties would ten times the size.
It’s not even a remote possibility in this country, and to even suggest it would get you laughed out of that town. It was never an option as a strategic starting point. It just wasn’t.
Lol, I’m well aware of all this. I also know that selling single-payer to the rest of the American people would have been hard. However, I think what would have been a better starting point would have been a Medicare-buy-in for ANY age group. Single-payer is hard to sell to the American public because
a. A lot of Americans are shielded from the health care crisis; they have insurance at fairly low rates, they’re in decent health
b. Because of a. most people don’t want anything to change. Changing things means their benefits and stuff get all out of whack, and Americans HATE change, even for the better.
c. It’s foreign, and Americans generally want “uniquely” American things because nationalism sells; it’s why Obama kept giving America a shutout in his SOTU
However, people know Medicare. It’s not foreign. It’s uniquely American. It works. It’s cheaper, it’s better. Using that as a start-off point for anyone to buy into it would have been the best route to take. It’s offering a public option with a choice, after all, and that’s what he campaigned on.
I’m not one of the people who thinks it was a tactical misstep by throwing it off the table. That’s like saying we’re starting the energy bill off with a carbon tax and moving down to cap and trade. Both are non-starters, and are a waste of time.
I think the biggest misstep was giving Max Baucus the keys.
I still don’t entirely understand all the progressive anger at Baucus’s strategy. Yes, he took too long. Yes, he was blatantly getting played by Grassley at the end. But as far as I remember (and I may remember incorrectly), Dems did not have 60 votes in the Senate at that time and weren’t sure to get them. Thus, at least one Republican vote was necessary – hence huge effort trying to convince one of the more likely Republicans to get on board.
And don’t forget, even had just one Republican – say Snowe – voted for the final Senate bill, it would have been a huge coup. You can laugh at bipartisanship all you want but the media would have eaten it up. Remember Snowe’s quote when the Finance Committee passed its bill: “When history calls, history calls?” It would have been that sort of thing writ large.
You didn’t have to start from universal healthcare, you could have started out will much stronger reforms, plus medicare buy ins for all uninsured, for example. I think what we’ve learned from all this is that it doesn’t really matter what’s in these bills- they just get ham-fisted into prewritten narratives by producers at fox news and david broder. devils in the details on these things. you have a point- it wasn’t feasible for obama to start with universal health care- but he didn’t have to cut deals with the insurance industry to make sure they could live with whatever came out of the congressional sausage. again, not to monday morning quarterback, but that may have been a bad calculation, and to the extent that had Rahm’s fingerprints on it, he should be held accountable.
i would have run things differently (hindsight, 20/20 of course): let outside progressives/unions push for some really tough reforms that the health insurance industry would hate; let the house committees get some pretty tough legislation bbuilidng on that organizing; let Harkin and Dodd get the framework for somethign equally tough moving in the senate. then if you want to make trades to calm down the health insurance industry so be it, but do it from a position of power.
For once I disagree with Ezra Klein.
Obama wants to hold a health insurance summit where they discuss cost control and insurance reform. In 6 hours, it should be pretty easy for Obama to show that this is a minimal, centrist reform effort. The House passes the bill the Senate already passed, both chambers pass a reconciliation fix, and you have insurance reform.
If the chambers can then go back and pass a public option, that’s icing on the cake. Administration can then reposition itself, and the democratic Congress, as champions of the people (TM).
But it makes sense to me not to try to include it in a bipartisan summit, where it would be the first measure to fall to the “bipartisan” chimera.
BTW, I’m one who doesn’t think Obama’s “bipartisanship” is about bipartisanship. He’s serious about changing the tone, but he’s also serious about passing reform. This is all about about reassuring skittish House progressives and Senate protocol freaks so they will pass the damn bill.
This is something I’ve been saying as well, when Obama uses language about bipartisanship it is clearly (in my mind) about the sort he is most famous for. By this I the “not Red America, or Blue America, but the United States of America” stuff, what I think freaks out so many in the progressive community is the “bipartisanship” that Senators talk about which is purely along party vote tally lines.
As always, Obama is addressing the voters when he talks about this stuff. These are the folks sick of Washington grandstanding and who just want to see solutions on the table instead of people scoring political points. They do want all sides to come together, what they typically aren’t aware of is the costs in terms of forfeiting good policy when that happens.
Klein has no point, and neither does Cohn. Sometimes I wonder if they’re just like the President: so afraid of scaring away people that they get no bill at all.
You keep Republicans out of power by giving Americans jobs, health care, and booming times. Sometimes this doesn’t work out, but then they steal elections so it can’t always be helped.
Yglesias is correct:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/fish-white-house-logic-on-public-option-revival.p
hp
It’s interesting – you hear a lot of talk right now about how exultant Republicans are. And perhaps they have some good reasons to be, although almost entirely as a result of Dem strategic errors, not GOP brilliance.
Yet all is not well in wingnut world. I was listening to the local rightwing radio show today, and the whole discussion was about how passage of “Obamacare” in some form is inevitable. It was a tone of muted despair, which surprised me since I am much more used to hearing that sort of thing on the left, and focused, productive confidence on the right.
Moreover, even if many wingers are setting sky-high expectations for themselves in November, they have a vanishingly small chance of actually achieving them. That is a recipe for disappointment. With disappointment comes anger, backlash, and disunity. And given current Republican misreadings of the electorate – remember, they are riding high now through no fault of their own, and in fact believe that voters have thoroughly rejected progressive ideas, a demonstrably false notion – given all that, serious Republican strategic mistakes and perhaps even a fracturing of their coalition are probable ahead.
I believe you’re right.
i think if you can get the public option through reconciliation number higher by early next week, things start to get interesting. some of the hold out senators (say, guys like ben cardin and other back benchers who keep their head down and don’t cause trouble) are going to start worrying they’re going to come out looking like nelson, lincoln and lieberman, who’s careers are effectively over after their terms are up because of their posturing. and come monday or tuesday, progressives will have every right to call out people like Cardin (im not picking on him, he’s just one of the names I’m surprised hasn’t signed on yet).
And then if this thing gets near 50, then Obama is in a bind, because we all know he can’t trade it for bipartisan support from the GOP. And then the question we’ll all be asking is, why take it out if it doesn’t buy you votes? Who’s vote are you buying by taking it out? And if its to buy the votes of meek senators like Cardin, then, Cardin could be looking at a well-funded netroots/union funded primary as a result of his grandstanding.
In other words, once you realize that Lieberman/Nelson/Lincoln, etc are out of the picture, how do you justify further watering down what is already a neoliberal/third way style bill that ideologically, is right down the middle of the democratic caucus?
The health care summit will be a pivotal moment in Obama’s presidency. The future of health care is on the line, but there’s a lot more. Obama will have to show his hand. He’s been flailing about alternatively punching hippies on one day, and on others strengthening the administrative and regulatory state like no one since LBJ. The health care summit will finally give hints on how he intends to govern this country and enact his agenda. Will he fight for what’s right? Will he punch hippies? Will he capitulate to whatever Scott Brown and Snowe/Collins want?
Wow, the Public Option as leverage. I never thought I’d see the day.
Of course it makes sense. Always has when considering the Reconciliation route. Why not pass that way if the writing on the wall indicates that no Republican is going to change their mind and vote for the HCR bill after it is negotiated during this “summit”.
Republicans should pay a price for their obstructionism and that price being solid Democratic policy and a base surge in an election year, even better.
But if Obama and the Dems are setting this football up only to pull it away from the base again for a couple of meaningless Moderate Republican votes, there will be hell to pay.
My feeling is that, if they’re reviving it, they’d better fucking intend to pass it.
And this is the problem with Obama positioning himself as the reasonable center between extreme hacks: it binds his hands from the doing the substantive and political right thing. This puts the lie to the notion that Obama’s rhetorical centrism is a brilliant strategy for achieving progressive policy; he will always have to prove his centrism to an opposition and media that will never be convinced, and therefore he will be, and is, unable to push in a progressive direction even if he wanted to.