Jonathan Bernstein is right that the president never made a secret deal to scrap the public option. But he doesn’t do a very good job of explaining what actually happened. The administration realized very early on that they didn’t have the votes to get a public option. And even the support they thought they had for it started to drift away over the summer of 2009. It wasn’t too hard to predict that a public option would not be in the bill, and the administration made that point in negotiations with some stakeholders.
It wasn’t something that was traded away, but its likely absence from the bill was part of the conversation. I’m sure the administration sought to exact some advantage from the situation by noting, for example, that they weren’t going to get everything they wanted and were going to make concessions. In the meantime, the administration did nothing to discourage its allies from pushing for a public option. Four of the five congressional committees that worked on the Affordable Care Act passed some version of a public option (the exception was Sen. Max Baucus’s Finance Committee). Ultimately, Harry Reid introduced the bill with a public option.
The problem was that we never had 60 votes in favor of a public option. That was true in January 2009 and it was still true in March 2010.
The fact that we are still discussing this issue given everything that’s happened since then is truly shameful.
And protip: No one who believes Obama “sold us out” is going to be convinced that he didn’t.
The fact that we are still discussing this issue given everything that’s happened since then is truly shameful.
The better question is why does Bernstein even bother? He’s not going to convince anyone, and everyone else has moved on to other things like OWS. Is he just jealous Of Ezra Klein?
People on this site have made that accusation, as late a a few months ago. (Brendan for one.) I appreciate it when reporters and columnists actually do their job and try to set the record straight. It’s too bad if information like this can’t change peoples minds.
Because Drew Westen brought it up. And au contraire, people in comments on many liberal blogs, and even Jon Walker at FDL, still repeatedly bring it up all of the time.
I mean, why should Media Matters exist by this logic?
I guess I don’t read all the right blogs then. I know he’ll find it hard to believe, but I actually come to the Frog Pond a lot more these days than I do TGOS. The thing is. Bernstein doesn’t offer any proof either. No one really knows what the deal was, or wasn’t. Look at Ben Nelson’s, and HolyJoe’s, actions towards the end of the bill. Besides, given what we know about the smog rules that the President just torpedoed, Bernstein is standing on very shaky ground.
No one really knows what the deal was, or wasn’t.
I count this as progress.
A whole lot of people have been saying exactly what they just knew the deal was.
That’s the point: the whole “secret deal to scrap the P.O.” thing was just a rumor, stated as fact by many people.
Bernstein was actually in the administration, no? He’s on less shakier ground than others in this particular instance.
Even so, I’m not all that willing to let Obama off easy. He could have twisted arms. We don’t know that any such effort was made or that he ever intended too. I’m a committed Obama supporter, for the most part, but I found much of Roger Hodge’s thoughts on Obama’s health care reform process convincing.
He could have twisted arms.
He did twist arms. There is a lot of very controversial stuff in the PPACA.
I don’t get this line of reasoning. The guy actually did the impossible and got a health care reform bill passed, when everyone else who tried over decades and decades failed, but people are talking as if he didn’t really try, or that he obviously should have been able to get even more.
It’s like reading someone who saw Roger Marris hit 61 home runs, writing “He should have had 70. You can tell he wasn’t really trying for any more.”
Somewhat off-topic, but is it too early to start thinking of what to do if the Supreme Court rules next year against some (e.g., the individual mandate) or all of the ACA?
Thought #1: If it’s just the individual mandate that’s overturned, then in the short term (i.e., before the 2012 election) it may be enough to leave the rest of the law in place and leave it up to the insurance companies to deal with the problems caused by not having the mandate.
Thought #2: Medicare for all.
The whole thing falls apart without the mandate. The mandate is to universal health insurance as the enforcement of tax collection is to a national health system. Why would anyone pay if they don’t have to and are still covered?
So, the system cannot stand with “just” the mandate stripped away. Something will have to be done. I can’t game out what that might be, although I suspect it will involve the Republicans obstructing any fixes that might work because they want to kill the idea of universal health care coverage entirely. We’ve already seen how they’ve been able to benefit from the public blaming Obama for the harm done by their own obstruction.
Yeah, I understand and agree that without the mandate the whole system eventually fall apart. I was just speculating whether in the short term (i.e., June 2012 – November 2012) there might be political advantages to a public position of just forging ahead with all the stuff in the ACA that people like (and that polls well), and letting the insurance companies squirm and squawk about it.
Just on the politics of it, I think “Medicare For All” might be the way to go if the Court rules against the ACA.
The Hebrew for ‘public option’ is ‘shibboleth’.
I’ll buy that there was no secret backroom deal to kill the public option, but who were the other people besides Lieberman who were committed to voting against the public option? It’s possible that at least one of the Ben Nelsons of the world might have planned to vote against it, but everyone was acting like the public option was viable until Lieberman’s declaration that he wouldn’t vote for it.
Why does the 60 vote argument persist? The bill was passed by reconcilliation, requiring only 51 votes.
It was present in separate bills passed by the House and Senate committees. It disappeared in conference, no?
I don’t know. That’s a good question.
Was the public option one thing that wasn’t passable via reconciliation? because of impact on the budget, or something? I used to know this, but it’s been forever in politics-years.
Was the public option one thing that wasn’t passable via reconciliation?
It was only a small collection of fixes that was passable via reconciliation. 99%+ of what was sent to the President’s desk was passed with 60 votes – and needed to be passed with 60 votes – on December 24, 2009.
Because you’re wrong. The bill passed the Senate with 60 votes on Christmas Eve. Before it could pass the House, the Dems lost their sixtieth seat in the Senate. That meant that the House had to pass the Senate bill word for word and letter for letter with no changes at all.
So, they did.
Then they passed a separate bill under reconciliation rules that only required 51 votes. That bill contained the changes that the House wanted.
It might have been possible to include a public option in the reconciliation part of the bill, but it could have been struck down by the parliamentarian. Also, sadly, the public option may not have even had 51 votes by the time it got to that point. It definitely was opposed by at least six or seven Democratic senators, and probably a few more who hid behind procedure so as to avoid the wrath of the base.
Sadly, I believe you’re right and it wouldn’t even get a majority of so-called Democrats. Still, I couldn’t understand the fierce opposition to having a vote on the public option so the voters could know where their Senator stood. But then, that was the reas9on wasn’t it? So that Senators could say they supported it when asking for money and volunteers without giving up the United Health money.
Sadly, I believe you’re right and it wouldn’t even get a majority of so-called Democrats.
Too far!
It probably would have gotten more than 40 out of 60 Democrats, so we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%-25% in favor.
And that’s in a year when a larger-than-usual fraction of the caucus were “so-called Democrats.”