Monday, August 17, 2009

Public Option: it's not over yet!

Although the Obama Administration may be signaling compromise on the government-run public option, there is no guarantee that the House agrees. See the below article from Politico.


Health concession fuels blowback
By: Mike Allen
August 17, 2009 09:47 AM EST

House Democratic officials say a public option will remain in their version of a health reform bill, even now that the White House has acknowledged it may be dropped later.

“This is just for the Senate,” a House leadership official said about the administration’s concession on a public option. “There is no way it passes the House the first time around without a public option.

“The liberals (around 100+) won’t allow it. It if comes back from conference committee without public option and there is the right pitch that it is this or nothing, then it may pass the House.”

Leaders now say the House will put off a vote on health reform until the end of September — to provide a cooling-off period from the raucous town meetings and to give strategists a better sense of where the Senate is headed.

The White House said the media frenzy was prompted partly by bored reporters who haven’t been paying attention to what the administration has been saying for weeks.

Linda Douglass, communications director of the White House Office of Health Reform, e-mailed: “Nothing has changed. The president has always said that what is essential is that health insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals.

But liberal and progressive Democrats reacted with disappointment, and administration officials rushed to reassure them.

Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, went so far as to say Democrats should try to “tackle health reform another time.”

“You can’t really have reform without a public option,” Dean said on CBS News’s “The Early Show. “If you don’t want to have the public option, … just do a little insurance reform … and then we’ll tackle health reform another time. But let’s not pretend we’re doing reform without a public option.

And strategist James Carville became the first leading Democrat to suggest publically that there might be political advantage in letting Republicans “kill” health care.

“Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That's what we ought to do.”

This weekend’s comments by White House officials simply acknowledged the long-obvious reality that the idea of a government-run insurance plan was partly a bargaining chip.

But the new public stance has caused heartburn throughout the party. Liberal Democrats are upset that one of their touchstones is already being downplayed. And some conservative House Democrats feel sold out after they spent recess defending an unpopular idea.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder blogged: “If you equate health care reform with a public option, then, well, health care reform is dead to you. There are a lot of angry liberals tonight. They are within their rights to feel aggrieved. ”

NBC News’ “First Read” reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina sent a message Sunday to some leading progressive and liberal leaders, arguing that the media was overhyping any position switch on a public option.

House Democratic leadership aides say they expect a public option will remain in the version of the bill that comes to the floor at the end of September.

House staff is working this week to combine three committee bills on health reform into one bill for the floor vote. The three started out as one bill, and the staff estimates that they’re still 80 to 85 percent the same.

The end of September is not a hard deadline for a floor vote, but leaders say it’s going to be a pretty firm target because they want it to pass this year and don’t want it to hang out there too long.

On the Senate side, leaders plan to try to enforce a Sept. 15 deadline President Barack Obama and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) have set for the committee to come up with a deal.

But Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said told PBS’s Charlie Rose: “More important than any artificial deadline is getting this right.”

Democratic strategists want to move forward at mid-September, in part to preserve the option of using a process called reconciliation to pass health care with a simple Senate majority, rather than the usual 60 votes.

A possible plan for Senate floor action would be to schedule a break for Columbus Day, which falls on Oct. 12. Leaders would schedule a vote right before getaway day.

Then a conference committee would start the laborious, heavily lobbied process of melding the two floor bills.

So Obama was being optimistic when he said Saturday at his town hall in Grand Junction, Colo.: “Even if everything goes perfectly and we pass legislation, let's say, in October, we're still going to have another three months of debate about this, then we're still going to have several years of implementation.”

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

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