As Harry Reid works through all the negotiations to bring a health care bill to the Senate floor, it is encouraging to hear him say that he is leaning towards a public option. It makes me wonder why Obama seems to be dampening expectations. Those two tea leaves are hard to reconcile. It almost looks like the battle over a public option is won and only requires a last little push from the White House. Certainly, Nancy Pelosi seems to be on board.
Still, to understand the White House’s actions, you have to know whether or not they have 60 votes for cloture. If they don’t, then they are going to hold their cards close for a little longer. The way to persuade those last Senate holdouts is to get both Reid and Pelosi talking about a public option, and that is what is happening. It appears that the Obama administration will refuse to the end to empower their opponents by drawing a line in the sand. We will not be seeing an all-or-nothing gauntlet laid down from the Bully Pulpit. Rather, the last holdouts will be won over by CBO scores in the House and by quiet persuasion in the Senate. Ironically, it could be a small group of senators, including Russ Feingold, who scuttle the final deal. I’m worried about the budget deficit, too, but we need to keep things in perspective.
I know I have stuck my neck out far enough on health care reform that it will be easy to lop it off and call me an idiot if it fails, or it passes in a totally unacceptable form. But, I wonder, if I have been right, will anyone ever admit it, or will they say that it only succeeded because they were so negative and skeptical?
I truly appreciate your commentary, and you are a lone voice in favor of your point of view.
For myself, I would like to trust that the Obama and the WH are playing the long game for a health care bill that contains a public option and is substantially better than the Baucus bill. I believe the Baucus bill would be a long-term fiscal and health disaster – despite the advantages Obama cites – and I cannot get behind it. Without trusting that Obama is trying to steer us in a better direction, I can’t support his efforts.
And if we get something better, I have no idea whether I acted in an optimal way by supporting DFA, or whether I would have been more effective with OFA. We may not even know for sure if or in which direction the WH finally pressed Congress.
The process may yet give us good health care reform, but transparent this ain’t.
I too truly appreciate your, Booman, commentary – very well thought out and you combine a progressive point of view with realism and depth of information about the process. The call for unity and to think of the benefits of “even the bill you least like” may be about emerging from this with a sense of unity and purpose and put aside any progressives vs. blue dogs bitterness and any sense that “we beat them” if we get a strong PO, so that we’ll go into the energy and environment issues from a position of strength. Obama said in that speech “I’m just getting started.” re: OFA vs DFA; I’ve always thought Obama didn’t appoint Howard Dean so Dean could work from a stronger position outside the admin pushing the PO. I gave what $$ I could to DFA for that reason.
That’s because there have been many factors pointing towards success, and many toward failure, but the latter and not the former seem to be getting exhausted. If a good health bill emerges, there will be many who can rightly claim credit based on what is in the public record now – Pelosi, for example, and the netroots. Obama’s position thus far has been carefully hedged.
Whether there is a PO in the Senate bill is now down to Baucus, Dodd, Reid, and Obama. We know Dodd is strongly in favor, Baucus opposed though he won’t say so openly and probably will vote for it because he’s on the committee. Reid probably doesn’t actually care, but he’s in election trouble, so we have him by what passes for his balls. That leaves Obama. If Obama comes out strongly for PO, it’s hard to see how it stays out of the Senate bill, and, since Pelosi will have medicare +5, out of the final bill. Yet the matter is still in question. And the person sent in was Rahm, a famous head-cracker. But when have you known Rahm to crack centrist heads to serve the left, rather than vice-versa? The selection of Rahm bodes ill. If it fails at this point, it is hard to see how Obama avoids blame, but if it passes, it still will not necessarily be clear that that was Obama’s intention all along – because that is the move that would make political sense for him anyway, unless the insurance companies can provide proof of a deal he is violating, and perhaps even then. So the situation is legitimately asymmetrical.
as I remarked to Booman, I think that if Senator Baucus signs on to a Public Option, it would indicate it’s something the industry lobbies regard as acceptably weak or, better, simply ineffective. Otherwise, I would expect he’ll vote against it on the floor.
I frequently have been asking a similar question: will the Left-blogosphere ever give Obama credit should they get what they want out of the health care process, or will they merely insist that he was forced to their position reluctantly?
It would be nice if his most virulent critics could just consider suspending their distrust and cynicism once in a while.
Speaking for myself, I come here because of your ability to see the big picture in DC. I am so disgusted with the whole process that I can’t possibly think rationally about anything that happens there anymore.
I tend to think you are wildly optimistic, but you usually turn out to be right about these things.
“or it passes in a totally unacceptable form”
regarding that, have you set out somewhere the details of what a totally unacceptable form means for you? I’m interested in knowing that.
If you can make a convincing case that, should a bill pass, the reform is a worthy one, I’d certainly acknowledge it. If such a bill comes through, it would mean that the industry lobbies failed in their attempts to derail it. Personally, if Baucus signs on to a Public Option, that, for me, would indicate it’s something the industry lobbies regard as acceptably weak or, better, simply ineffective. Otherwise, I would expect he’ll vote against it on the floor—and what if Senator Snowe claims that she “gave at the office” and, on the final floor vote after conference committee reconciliation, votes “Nay”. So much, in that case, for bi-partisan support.
Baucus is one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate and he is well known for hauling in loads of corporate cash. He is no friend of the consumer on most issues, but he did introduce the public option in his original plan and only scuttled it when his own committee members balked. A cynic might argue that he was behind that sell-out from the beginning, but I’ve paid close attention to Baucus on health care for a long time and I don’t think that is what happened.
You are setting up quite a hurdle in arguing that a public option must be lame if it actually passes.
An unacceptable health care reform would be one that does one of two things. If it mandates that we all have health care insurance but doesn’t offer us a non-profit option. And/or if it mandates that we have health care insurance but doesn’t provide adequate subsidies for people who can’t afford it.
No public option, no mandate. Inadequate subsidies, no mandate.
There are numerous other ways that reform could be better or worse, of course, but that is what would be simply unacceptable.
As I was ‘saying’ when the “spike” “spoked” and it all went ‘poof’, thank you for the yard-stick on what constitutes an unacceptable plan. I’ll watch. I think your “bar” of acceptability is reasonable—even a triffle daring as you mentioned a non-profit element. For me, that meets the bar–with just one tiny caveat: the number of currently uninsured who, under the plan as passed, actually succeed in becoming insured. If the figure is at, over or very near what’s been promised, though I’d regret the remainder not included, I’d congratulate you on your tea-leaf reading and the Obama team on achieving at least something in a significant improvement.
And the industries’ lobbies? A loss for them? One thing I don’t expect to hear from any of the industries who lobbied against the legislation are reasonably content with they are with the plan, assuming one passes. They’ll insist that they didn’t get what they wanted, even if they largely did, I’d bet.
I’m going off the top of my head here, but I think somewhere around 18 million people are considered illegal non-citizens who won’t be eligible for any government subsidies. Somewhere around thirty million people would be newly covered. And, about 96% of the people living here would wind up with coverage. Those numbers move around a bit depending on whether you have a mandate or not, how low the fines are for non-compliance, etc. But that’s in the ballpark.
Of course, the bill’s major reforms involve minimizing community-rating, eliminating recissions, covering people with preexisting conditions, and allowing for total portability of health care.
Those reforms would be worthy even in an otherwise terrible bill.
Before this current semi-depression hit, the figures commonly cited were of about “forty million” Americans without health insurance and, thus, without other than emergency-room care for the most part. Since the semi-depression, I must assume that several million more have become uninsured as they lost their coverage when they lost their jobs–not that I assume a one-to-one ratio of jobs lost and insurance lost. Some would have been able to carry some plan even after job loss, whether by their coverage by a relative or a separation coverage carried over from their employer. Still, some large number—several hundreds of thousands—have joined the uninsured, I suspect.
For my part, as wonderful as these are–“reforms involv[ing] minimizing community-rating, eliminating recissions, covering people with preexisting conditions, and allowing for total portability of health care”—they wouldn’t redeem a program that did not bring under meaningful coverage at least the much-vaunted “19 million” and those who have joined them since Lehman Bros. went dark.
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this garbled mess was intended to say,
“One thing I don’t expect to hear from any of the industries who lobbied against the legislation (is that they) are reasonably content with
they are withthe plan, assuming one passes. They’ll insist that they didn’t get what they wanted, even if they largely did, I’d bet.”what do you mean by “if i am right”?
if you mean “i, booman, understood the administration’s strategy”, that will be impossible to determine, because the administration has been anything but transparent. (i will say that the fact that they’re dampening expectations, despite that “the public option has been won”, is disappointing and more than a little ominous).
But I think you are comparing apples and oranges. A major reason the public option has so much support is SPECIFICALLY because people were skeptical and pressured their congresscritters relentlessly, and that people were negative about some of the bad ideas that were floated. Maybe that was part of the grand strategy too: “get people mad enough to fight.”
But as i say, the administration has not been transparent and so if you ARE correct, it will be difficult to say if you were right all along.
I’m giving you a case of beer if you’re right, and I’m not asking you to give me a case if I’m right, because I know the disappointment will be crushing enough.
i want you to be right, for everyone’s sake.
I’ll be happy to heap praise upon you. And I hope you’ll do the same for Harry Reid. But don’t count those chickens yet.
Most importantly it gets a public option without the industry being able to say that Obama did not keep his part of the bargains they struck in the spring.
Which makes clear that it was the industry, not Obama, who bargained in bad faith.
For example, the AHIP-supported Americans for Prosperity bus was at the NC State Fair, exactly at the entrance that senior citizens being bused to the fair would come in. There was a continuous loop about Congress and the president taking away what you have by a government takeover of healthcare. And they had petitions to Congress for people to sign. Loud, obnoxious, repetitive. And yes, the Commissioner of Agriculture, whose department manages the State Fair is a Republican. Why might you ask?
BTW, the only folks signing the petition were a similar profile to folks stopping at the Sons of Confederate Veterans booth and the Republican Party booth (high profile for Virginia Foxx, incidentally).
The bus shows how well the industry has kept its part of the bargain, as if it could not be foreseen.
If you are right, I will gladly acknowledge that I was wrong about 11th dimensional chess. If you are wrong, I won’t gloat. I know how hard analysis and prediction are, otherwise I would be rich.
I think you are now guilty of over-reading every distinct tea leaf (which you have largely avoided, unlike most bloggers).
Nothing in the article you mention actually suggests that Obama is dampening expectations over a public option. But even that interpretation was correct, it’s entirely consistent with what the administration has been saying for months.
Moreover, what purpose would be served by Obama sounding an optimistic tone on the public option (or anything else about health care) right now? Optimism feels good temporarily, but risks sliding into over-confidence and complacency.
Once we have actual legislation passed, the cigars can be handed out.
the speech was a “getting fired up” speech – his listing the strengths of “even the bill you least like” seemed to me to be about giving us a sense of accomplishment at the same time as getting fired up for the next battles. and he started out with we’ve already gotten further than ever before and it has been a 100 year process. he talked about how difficult it is to accomplish our goals – he also joked about the Insurance co’s not liking hcr “does that mean we’re going to give up?”