| Passing health care reform with a public option looks better by the day.
Yesterday, Sens. Schumer and Rockefeller opined health care reform would have "a good, strong, public option." Sherrod Brown, yesterday, thought pessimism is ill-founded:
Not every Democrat right now would prefer the public option in the Senate ... but no Democrat in the end is going to vote against a procedural question to kill the health care bill," he said.
"The 60 Democrats will stay together on procedural questions and then, on final passage, some may vote against it because it's got a public option. But I don't see that," he said. Brown added that at least 50 Democrats in the Senate support the public option.
That procedure will be made easier after Ted Kennedy's replacement, Paul Kirk, is sworn in to the Senate today.
And, according to Ryan Grim, opposition to the public option among House Blue Dogs is fading:
Blocking a public health insurance option is a relatively low priority for conservative Blue Dog Democrats, according to an ongoing survey of its members. The fading House opposition could clear the way for the public option to move through the chamber.
The Blue Dogs have been surveying their membership over the last several days; coalition co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) has been collecting the responses. She listed the four top priorities that have emerged: Keeping the cost under $900 billion, not moving at a faster pace than the Senate, getting a 20-year cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and addressing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursement rates.
(These demands are actually quite reasonable, especially the last. Much of the burden for paying for Medicare expansion will fall on the states.)
And Nancy Pelosi has rejected the idea of a public option trigger.
In any case, voting in the Senate Finance Committee on the various amendments to Baucus' bill is happening today. Chris Bowers ( in a must-read post) crunches the numbers, lays the political landscape out, and singles out those on the committee who are the key votes to the existence of a public option on this bill: Baucus, Carper, Conrad (who says he opposes it in an Ezra Klein interview, while simultaneously lauding France's healthcare system), Lincoln, and Nelson. (Also, check out the Washington Indepedent's Senate Public Option Scorecard for who stands where on the public option. And it's shocking to see how many Democrats are ambivalent about real healthcare reform.)
In any case, by the end of the day, we should know a lot more about where the public option stands, and who stands against it. |
