Chris Cillizza picks the winners and losers from yesterday’s health care summit. Among the losers is the public option:
Public Option: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) were the only ones to mention the issue that dominated the health care debate for months on end last fall — and that was in the context of it being sacrificed as a compromise to Republicans. And, as Fix colleague Alec MacGillis pointed out, Obama was very careful to emphasize that people shopping for coverage on the new health insurance exchanges he is proposing would be choosing only among ‘private plans.'”
Actually, here is the president’s reference to the public option.
When it comes to the exchange, that is a
market-based approach, it’s not a government-run approach. There were criticisms about the public option; that’s when supposedly there was going to be a government takeover of health care, and even after the public option wasn’t available, we still hear the same rhetoric. And it turns out that what we’re now referring to is we have an argument about how much we should regulate the insurance industry.We have a concept of an exchange, which previously has been an idea that was embraced by Republicans before I embraced it, and somehow suddenly it became less of a good idea.
Now, I don’t care for the passive-aggressive way in which the president drops the public option here, but his point is solid. The Republicans pretended to object to the public option because it would represent an expansion of government influence on the health care industry, but what they really object to is the president passing a major piece of legislation, no matter what is in it. I think that that was the lesson Obama wanted to demonstrate to the American people with yesterday’s summit. What he needed to do is make it as plain as possible that there are no possible concessions the Democrats could make to gain bipartisan support. The Republicans are simply objecting to everything and will give the administration zero votes even if he makes more concessions.
From that standpoint, the summit was a success. It allows wavering Democrats to tell their constituents truthfully that all efforts were made to make the bill bipartisan but it proved impossible.
Now, I would take that a step further and pass the bill the president campaigned on (which included a public option) since it’s clear that making compromises didn’t win the support of any Republicans and didn’t make the bill more popular and didn’t wring the most savings out of the system. I would pass the bill that is best from a policy point of view. And I think it would be easier to pass this bill (in the House, at least) with a public option than without one. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think so. Although I do recognize that we might have a bit of a problem with the parliamentarian if we put a public option in reconciliation, I’m inclined to push a bill that is, you know, popular.
However, I don’t see any signs of a pivot.
