Surprisingly, the Las Vegas Sun has a bit of a fluff-piece on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s role in passing health care reform. Amazingly, it never once mentions the ‘evil’ Rahm Emanuel. Yet, it does provide some interesting insights into the behind the scenes negotiating that Reid carried out at different points in the process. I think the take-away is that Ben Nelson exerted an effective veto over the public option and Joe Lieberman did the same for the expanded Medicare buy-in. There was a narrow window to try to push the public option through reconciliation (which is what I advocated from the beginning) but, in the end, the toxicity of the political climate left the entire process in too much doubt for Reid and the administration to risk everything on it.
After Lieberman upended the process yet again [by scuttling the Medicare buy-in], Obama asked the majority leader, “Is health care dead?
“No,” Reid said, according to those aware of the conversation. “I’ve got, in the state of Nevada, people who can’t afford health care. I’ll fix it.” …
…Reid pivoted again, setting out to convince his progressive wing there was no other choice but to pull the Medicare expansion, ending its hopes for a government-run alternative to private insurers.
Better to have something than nothing, Reid argued. This was important for the presidency, for their party. Democrats, he said, needed to stick together.
Reid brought senators on board, sealed the agreement with Nelson and called the votes.
And then in reconciliation:
Some senators were reluctant to use the reconciliation process, which is reserved for the most crucial situations, fearing a backlash from Republicans shut out of the process.
Others wanted changes to the bill. A coalition of liberal senators led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wanted an amendment returning the public option.
Reid convinced them, Sanders said, that it might “destabilize a very sensitive situation.” The majority leader promised a vote on the public option after health care reform became law.
The “very sensitive situation” was the extremely narrow margin with which the reforms had passed the House. There simply were no more progressive votes to pick up in the House by including the public option in reconciliation, but there were conservative votes to lose.
In the end, the Republicans lost the battle over health care, but they succeeded in rallying their base and raising general anxiety about the bill to a point that there was no safety in the middle. Given Ben Nelson’s opposition to the public option and Olympia Snowe’s refusal to cross the aisle, the only way to pass a public option through the Senate was in reconciliation. For a variety of reasons, the Democrats strongly preferred to avoid using reconciliation, and by the time they realized that they had no alternative the debate had become so toxic that the will no longer remained in the House to pass a public option.
It was a close call. Had the Democrats not suffered a couple of pro-public option retirements in the interim between the two votes, they might have been able to pull it off after all. But the main thing was to assure passage of the bill. The exchanges don’t come into existence until 2014, and there is plenty of time to add a public option before then. Whether that is done or not depends a lot on how the midterms go.
Very good post. IMO you’ve nailed the tone-deafness of Hamsher and her dwindling band of acolytes in screeching “Sellout!” over the public option to the bitter end (that is, when she wasn’t screeching “Sellout!” over the Stupidpak sideshow).
The thing was hanging by a fucking thread at the end, and there was zero room to rock the boat. Reid et al absolutely did the right thing, and the passage of the bill was and is a HUGE victory that hopefully will turn the political tide. Losing, on the other hand, would have been absolutely catastrophic.
I’m sure others will disagree, but I honestly don’t believe anyone who truly has progressive interests — as opposed to self-interest — at heart could fail to recognize this.
IMO you’ve nailed the tone-deafness of Hamsher and her dwindling band of acolytes in screeching “Sellout!” over the public option to the bitter end (that is, when she wasn’t screeching “Sellout!” over the Stupidpak sideshow).
I think you miss the bigger point. The PO was like EFCA. Because as you should remember, they got at least 51 Democratic Senators on the record supporting the PO. What that shows, again, is that Democrats in the Senate are willing to stick their necks out a little more when they know something isn’t going to pass(ie. when the tough vote comes, they don’t wanna piss off their corporate backers).
I gotta agree with sanelib. Legislation in this country moves incrementally, and the most important (political) aspect of this whole thing is that we got our foot in the door towards the creation of a true universal healthcare system. Reid did the right thing, and IMO deserves a hell of a lot more credit than he’s getting. The Majority Leader position is an incredibly fucking hard job (see Caro’s book Master of the Senate), mostly because it involves herding cats with egos the size of Saturn. It also seems to be one of those jobs where you rarely get credit when you win, but always get blamed when you lose.
Reid may not be as much of a hero as Nancy Pelosi in all this, but he’s right up there too, and whether or not he’s back with us in the next Congress history will remember him very well.
We firepups are not dwindling, unlike kos!
I am skeptical there will be much of bounce out of this.
So what would your legislative strategy be, Boo? If the goal is to establish a new federal program that offers health insurance, how would you go about it? Can you diagram it for us?
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The Health Insurers Saved The Day or was it Republican intransigence?
Demands Explanation from Anthem Blue Cross of California
Following the announcement of the rate hike, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to Anthem, a subsidiary of Wellpoint, demanding an explanation for the steep hikes at a time when Wellpoint’s corporate profits are soaring. “With so many families already affected by rising costs, I was very disturbed to learn through media accounts that Anthem Blue Cross plans to raise premiums for its California customers by as much as 39%,” Sebelius wrote to Wellpoint’s President Leslie Margolin.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
It’s that there is NO RELIEF until at least 2014.
Neither I (a $3,000 donor in 2008) nor anyone else in my situation is going to lift a finger for Obama or any other democrat until we have health insurance relief. That would be the 2016 election.