Possible Senate Compromises.

I wrote a really substantial article about public option compromises that could garner 60 votes for cloture and over 50 actual votes in the senate two nights ago, but Blogger decided to not save or post it.

Thankfully, Ezra Klein wrote an article saying almost the exact same things that I did -- but obviously way shorter and more articulate. You should read it here. He sums up that there are three possible compromises that Senate leadership is looking into with regards to the bill and the public option. They are (1) the trigger (2) an opt-in clause and (3) an opt-out clause. Ezra goes into some details on the positives and negatives of each situation on his blog. The good news about all three of these is that each one (technically) has a public option and -- I think -- all three of them can pass the Senate.

However, the trigger is really scary because triggers are commonly put into legislation and then never enacted, thus there never being a public option to reduce health care costs for all Americas. The opt-in compromise is bad, because pending on how the legislation looks, local governments would either have to have their state legislature pass a public option or they would have to wait until a substantial election for the people of the state to vote a public option in, which is completely unfair to some states and would probably only lead to 15-20 states actually getting it. Finally, the opt-out option is a fantastic compromise -- mostly because it's not really a compromise, but it gives some conservative senators the cover they need to vote for cloture on this health care reform package. The reason why it's not really a compromise is because the legislation for a public option with an recourse for states to opt-out would likely have a stipulation that states would have to allow the public option to function for two to three years. Almost nobody would vote to cancel this except for a few right-wing nut-jobs. By that time, there would be, at the bare minimum, 1,000 of those elected officials' constituents on the public plan. No politician in their right mind would actively vote to push one thousand out of their insurance. Also, no majority of Americans would vote to overturn it, because many people would be on the plan already and the other 85% of the state would basically be voting to raise their insurance prices -- it would be extremely unlikely for a majority of a state to support this.



With that said, what Reid seems to believe (and I agree) is that he can get 60 senators to vote for cloture on a bill that includes a public option with an opt-out clause and then pass the actual bill with probably 55 actual votes. Progressives have been rallying together to push Reid into this decision and it either (a) worked or (b) they wasted their time because Reid was going to push for this compromise anyway. However, we might have missed our mark pressuring Reid, when it seems like we should have been pressuring the White House this whole time. At this point, the White House is pretty openly supporting a trigger. They worked so long and hard to court Snowe (R-ME) into supporting a bill for a charade of bipartisanship, so they don't want to lose their only Republican vote. She has also made it very clear that if the public option takes any form besides a trigger, she will not only vote against it, but she will filibuster the bill with the rest of her caucus. The good news at this point is that the White House doesn't have the majority of say in the legislative process for health care. And Obama will -- guaranteed -- sign whatever Democratic health care reform bill that hits his desk. However, this process would be insanely easier if we had the White House actively pushing moderate Democrats to vote for a health care reform bill that includes an opt-out public option.

Final blog message: As of 10/24/2009 at 8:13PM, the public option is in good shape. But who the fuck knows what happens day-to-day anymore.