There has certainly been a lot of garment-rending and gnashing of teeth lately about the health insurance reform bill and whether the public option will be included in the final bill. I think Obama is once again pursuing the long game – he’s allowing the Republicans to be seen as the ones who are standing in the way of bipartisanship and he is the one who is doing everything possible to get a deal.
We all know that bipartisanship is not all that important in the end. Medicare was only passed with 51 votes. No one is going to remember in the long run who was for it and who was against it. Another learning is that once it’s in place people will like it. So, Obama knows that this legislation is his legacy (his waterloo, as DeMint put it) and he wants to get the best bill that he can.
I hope Obama and Howard Dean are working together because Howard Dean lays out two different scenarios for getting a public option:
Scenario 1 – allow people to buy into Medicare. I personally think this one is brilliant because Republicans have been pushing the Medicare scare tactics.
Scenario 2 – House/Senate conference and reconciliation. In this scenario, the House would pass a bill with a strong public option and the Senate would pass a bill without a public option (to get 60 votes or more to overcome a filibuster). Then the public option is added back into the bill during the House/Senate reconciliation conference. Once this is done, only 50 votes are needed in the Senate (with Biden casting a tie-breaker vote). This would certainly allow some conservadems to vote against the bill, as long as they vote for cloture.
I think probably all of these options are on the table right now. Stop despairing and keep the pressure up. The media is starting to report on the pressure from the left, which is a good thing IMO.