With the release of the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the Senate Finance Committee’s health-care bill, it is now officially silly season. Speculation is running rampant, including some truly goofy theories. But Steven Benen has a level-head:
I’ll have more in the morning, but in the meantime, the key takeaway from the CBO report is straightforward enough: it moves the process forward. If the CBO had released a report trashing the Baucus bill — higher than expected costs, lower than expected savings — the result would have been quite a bit of chaos on the Hill.
This afternoon’s report keeps the ball rolling in the right direction.
Baucus’s goal was to produce a bill that doesn’t increase the deficit, costs less than $900 billion over the next ten years, and that bends the cost curve of medical spending. He did that, and the bill should pass through his committee for no other reason than it will allow someone other than Baucus to work on this legislation.
It’s nice to see that Bob Dole is solidly behind health care reform and is out there mocking Mitch McConnell for running a Party of No. Rumors that the Republicans are preparing to cave and set their members free to vote for it are encouraging. But it’s all talk right now.
What I expect is that the momentum will continue to build for a robust public option because that is what the president campaigned on and has said he wanted all along. If it comes with an opt-out for the states, I doubt any of them will act on it. That will probably be a compromise without any consequence.
I can live with that.
I can live with anything.
Because all long journeys start with a first step.
nalbar
It’s a lot easier to be sanguine about the opt out for states when you live in Pennsylvania than if you’re in Oklahoma. If Mary Fallin becomes governor next year, all bets are off in that department.
An opt-out option for states might be a good thing, too. If a state wants to opt-out in order to take all their medicaid, medicare and SCHIP federal money in order to provide a state-wide universal care system in which “all persons” in their state receive the care they need, when they need it – no matter what.
Once one state does something like this, hopefully others will follow. Are you listening California? Elect a Democratic governor next time and you might just see this happen.
more had been made about the opt outs available for the stimulus. Of course, in the end, no one actually opted out.
An opt out for states is an ideal compromise. Imagine the migration of small business from states without a public option to states that have one! It would be a thing of wonder.
This is the sort of compromise we should get behind. Let Jindal suggest opting out of cheap health insurance.
The opt-out for the states will fail because of the difficulty of answering this simple question:
Who has the authority to opt a state out? The governor? The legislature? A referendum or initiative?
Once opted-in, can a state opt out? Once opted out, can a state opt in? And how much healthcare chaos might that cause?
How do you do a CBO score on the opt-out provision?
For those states that opt in, who regulates the healthcare insurance industry — the feds or he state insurance commissioners?
I doubt if this makes it into the final bill although it might make it in the final Finance Committee bill, without CBO scoring.