Last week, I did a major piece called Understanding the Strategy, wherein I made the following argument. I said that the Obama administration canvassed the Senate back in the winter and realized that they didn’t have the votes to pass a public option through the Senate Finance Committee, although they did have the votes to pass it through the other four committees with jurisdiction over health care reform. They also thought that they might not have 60 senators in their caucus (because of Kennedy, Byrd, Franken, and Specter being then still a Republican). So, they figured they’d need to use the budget reconciliation process to pass a public option. They made sure the budget included a provision for reconciliation, and then they set out to pass the public option through the committees it could pass, while urging Max Baucus to reach out for some Republican support, no matter how illusory that mission seemed. The goal was to negotiate with the Republicans, but if they refused to play ball, to paint them as obstructionists. They had to set a predicate for using the budget reconciliation process. To do that, they allowed the public option to be kicked around as something they might be willing to drop in return for Republican support. Co-ops were floated, triggers were floated. But, as anyone could have predicted, the Republicans weren’t biting.
Along the way, the Democrats got some good luck. Specter defected to the Democratic caucus, Franken won his court case and was seated, and Kennedy was replaced by someone healthy and available to vote. The Dems achieved a functioning 60-member caucus, subject to the availability of Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
The careful dance the Democrats were playing in the Senate Finance Committee was predicated on three things. At first, it was thought that Olympia Snowe might be necessary to obtain cloture. Second, to keep the ball moving in the committee, since they knew Democratic members of the committee wouldn’t support a public option, they had to appear willing to sign a bill without a public option. Third, they wanted to have their efforts at compromise visibly rejected so they could make the case for either passing the bill on a party-line vote or going to the controversial budget reconciliation process.
The premise of my argument is that the goal all along was to pass a bill that largely hewed to the plan Obama ran on as a candidate. They couldn’t get that plan passed out of Finance, but as long as they got something out of Finance they could move ahead. To get something out of Finance, they had to signal a willingness to sign a bill without a public option even if their goal all along was to do just that.
The Finance Committee finished their mark-up of the bill last night at 2:15 in the morning. They will vote on it early next week, and it will probably pass on a party-line vote (possibly with the support of Snowe). The big question is whether, after the bill is melded with the HELP bill, it will have a public option or not. If it does, it will take sixty votes to get rid of it. If it doesn’t, it will take sixty votes to put it in. While the Committee was in the process of marking up the bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid told people back in Nevada that he was a big fan of Olympia Snowe’s trigger. Once it was clear that the mark-up of the bill was nearly complete, Reid changed his tune:
In a conference call with constituents, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said today there will be a “public option” in whatever health insurance reform bill comes out of Congress, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.
Said Reid: “We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president’s desk. I believe the public option is so vitally important to create a level playing field and prevent the insurance companies from taking advantage of us.”
Update: Reid’s office sends over this statement: “Sen. Reid believes that health insurance reform must include a mechanism to keep insurers honest, create competition and keep costs down,” the statement reads. “He feels that the public option is the best way to do that. While we don’t know exactly what that option will look like, Sen. Reid, working with President Obama, will ensure that whatever is included in the final bill does just that.”
This is exactly the tack I expected. The public option was negotiable until the exact moment that Finance completed its mark-up. Then it was not negotiable. That was the strategy, my friends.
Now, this isn’t the end of the story, by any means. There is difference between a public option and a robust public option. A robust public option will have its reimbursement rates tied to Medicare’s reimbursement rates. That’s what we want. That’s what the Progressive Caucus in the House is insisting be in the bill. A worrying sign is that as Reid tacks to the left, Pelosi may be tacking to the right. The middle may be reached by settling on a non-robust public option.
We shall see. But, based on Reid’s abrupt turnabout, I feel confident that I had gamed out this strategy correctly. The Senate looks like it will have some form of public option in the base bill, even after signaling for months that that was something they were willing to trade away.
I’d love to see a robust public option pass the House and then prevail in the Conference Committee. That is still a rough road, and Pelosi is flirting with compromise at precisely the wrong time. But the plan appears to be going according to plan, just as I envisioned it. If the House Progressives really hold firm, this bill may not pass through the Senate after the Conference Report. If that happens, we could still go to budget reconciliation, but the blame for that would be placed on progressives, making it a politically treacherous path. This thing isn’t won, but it is on track.
