Public option gains speed
Public option gains speed
October 23, 2009
By: Michael Riley
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is moving toward including a public health-insurance option in the final bill he will send to the floor, senators briefed on the issue said Thursday, putting a dramatic end to a week of steadily gaining momentum for the lightningrod provision.
Public option gains speed
October 23, 2009
By: Michael Riley
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is moving towardincluding a public health-insurance option in the final bill he willsend to the floor, senators briefed on the issue said Thursday, puttinga dramatic end to a week of steadily gaining momentum for thelightningrod provision.
Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said they had been told that Reid and others negotiating the final bill are considering the plan.
"I'm not part of those discussions. What I'm hearing is that this is the direction of the conversation," said Conrad, who supports an alternative approach under which nonprofit co-ops would compete with private industry.
"I keep hearing there is a lot of leaning toward some sort of national public option, unfortunately, from my standpoint," Nelson said. The White House declined to comment. Reid's office did likewise, and the Nevada Democrat left the White House on Thursday without talking to reporters. A move in the Senate to have the government sell insurance in competition with the private sector would alter expectations of a tough slog for the public option that analysts long believed had no chance in the Senate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced this week that she had the 218 votes needed to pass a strong version of the public option, and the White House also appears to have calculated that a final bill without a public option could create more problems than it solves.
Strengthens its position
If before this week most Democrats believed the only chance of passing a public option was tough negotiations in a conference after votes in both chambers, Reid's move suddenly offers at least one more — and a much easier — path.
"The Senate passing a bill including a public option greatly strengthens the chance of it being in the final bill" said Kristofer Eisenla, spokesman for Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of Denver, a strong supporter of the concept and a key House negotiator on health care.
Thursday's developments came as a surprise even to House Democrats and left analysts guessing because weeks of discussions over how to combine two very different Senate health care bills have taken place mostly in secret. Those meetings include Reid; two Senate committee chairmen, Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; and a small group of administration officials led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
And one hard core of the political landscape hasn't moved much at all: There are still a handful of conservative Democrats who say they oppose a national public option like the one Reid is said to favor — among them Nelson, Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who caucuses with Democrats. Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican whose vote has been furiously courted by Democrats, already has said she'd vote against a bill with the Reid provision in it.
But set against that are factors that have suddenly risen in importance, especially in light of the bill passed out of the Senate Finance Committee this month with no public option and one GOP vote — Snowe's.
That approach requires everyone to buy insurance but spends less on subsidies to help poor and middle-class families do that. A growing number of Democrats are fearful that the Finance Committee approach would leave millions of voters with higher insurance bills but little else to show from the Obama administration's biggest domestic-policy initiative of his first year.
"There is a nervousness within the Democratic Party that they are about to put a bill forward that will increase premiums for middle-class Americans, not provide adequate subsidies and not have benefits kick in until several years from now. That's not a politically great place to be," said Julian Zelizer, an expert on Congress at Princeton University.
Moderates coming around
This week, Colorado's two Democratic senators sent a letter to constituents calling for the public option in any final bill and then set up a new website where the public could express its support.
And DeGette spokesman Eisenla said moderate Democrats in the House have increasingly come around to the idea that the public option will actually be an asset they can take to voters next fall, allowing them to argue that it lowers costs for thousands of businesses and millions of voters who will be required to buy insurance under the new reforms.
But with Reid still unable to show he can find the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward in the Senate, analysts say that in the end, the sudden momentum for a public option in a final bill may disappear as quickly as it arose.
"In may all just be a negotiating tool," Zelizer said. "You put it in, you try and show Democratic supporters you gave it everything you have, and in the end, you give away the public option to get the votes of the Conrads and the Baucuses."
"The public option could, ironically, end up protecting the Senate Finance version because by removing it, you can say we'll settle for this in the conference committee and then just move forward," he said.