More development! Straight from Reid's spokesperson:
If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.This is, of course, in the aftermath of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius telling Rachel Maddow:
Maddow: "The private insurance company writ large hasn't done a great job. That's why we want a public option to compete with them. These 18 Democratic senators want to bring that back into the fold. If that happened, would the administration fight for it?"Now, keep in mind that reconciliation isn't 100% certain to be the process moving forward yet. The odds of the leadership using reconciliation multiplied by the odds of them putting the public option back into the bill if reconciliation is used is still quite small. But Reid certainly just made it bigger.
Sebelius: "Well, I think if it's...Certainly. If it's part of the decision of the Senate leadership to move forward, absolutely."
Also remember that the process is stickier than it seems. The House [rightfully] doesn't exactly trust the Senate to move on this reconciliation package if it just promises to. That is why the House has said that it will not sign the Senate's bill as a base until the reconciliation sidecar is passed first. The only problem with that is, to my knowledge, it's never been done before. There has never, in the history of legislation, been a bill passed to fix another bill that hasn't been passed yet. So Senate leadership aides are a bit confused on how to move forward.
Either way, this is certainly a development. For all the good reasons -- and the bad.
The important things to watch out for are the upcoming endorsements or refusals from:
- Dick Durbin (Assistant Majority Leader)
- Max Baucus (Senate Finance Committee Chairman)
- Kent Conrad (Senate Budget Committee Chairman)
- Tom Harkin (Senate HELP Committee Chairman)
- Chris Dodd (Senior Member Senate HELP Committee)
Just remember not to expect anything before the Bipartisan Health Care Summit on February 25th. It would be a big mistake to do so.
However, it would certainly not be a mistake on their part to pass a public option. It's a policy-and-political home-run.
However, it would certainly not be a mistake on their part to pass a public option. It's a policy-and-political home-run.
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3 comments:
This one is straight from the White House, and I'm cheering. Watch the noise from the local trolls and the Right and you'll see how threatened they are when the Democratic Party's fighting spirit gets into gear.
Maybe if he did this the first go around back in oh say July, he could be talking about Job creation and financial reforms right now.
Still stand by my Maslow Hierarchy of needs theory.
Health Care is a second tier item to a roof over someone's head and a feeling of employment security.
The problem with using reconciliation from the beginning was that we wouldn't have the base Senate bill -- and we wouldn't be able to pass anything that didn't adversly affect the budget. So we could get things (probably) like the public option, subsidies, etc. But we'd lose all the other stuff that is vitally necessary, like the exchanges and insurance reforms.
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