Is the public option really dead?

This evening, I had the pleasure of speaking with AIP’s own Rick Moran and Jazz Shaw of The Moderate Voice. We discussed health care, specifically the fate of the public option. During the course of our conversation, which you can find here if you’re inclined to listen, Rick mentioned an article by David Limbaugh that suggests that the administration’s backing away from the public option is part of a larger plan to push the public option through during a conference committee between the House and Senate. Limbaugh writes:

“Even if Obama is forced to abandon the public option temporarily, it will probably be mere semantic abandonment. The CATO Institutes’s Michael Tanner argues that the compromise plan being considered by six members of the Senate Finance Committee would eliminate the public option in name only. A health insurance co-op plan, he says, is just another name for government-run health insurance.

But Howard Dean revealed a more cynical Democratic strategy, which would obviate the co-op charade. Dean told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the Senate’s removal of the public option is a ploy to get the bill through the Senate and then have the public option reinserted at the reconciliation stage, where it would only require 50 votes, not a supermajority. Dean admitted that “the president knows very well that you aren’t really going to have health care reform without a public option. But he also knows he has to get this out of the Senate.”

I’d be interested in hearing what our AIP readers think about this suggestion. I still believe, as I said on Rick’s show, that strategy is flawed, and if that is the path that Democrats want to take, they’re going to anger a lot of people. This isn’t the first time Howard Dean has mentioned pushing the bill through without a majority vote in the Senate. He has also appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos where he made clear that he believed the public option should be pushed through no matter what, through reconciliation if necessary.

If the debate over health care reform hadn’t become so heated and so personal, then perhaps Democrats could get away with pushing the bill through the way Dean suggests. But, anyone who thinks that they can unilaterally shove this down Americans throats with the American people paying such close attention is completely out of touch. Polls show that 49% now disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care reform, and 54% think that passing no reform is better than passing current proposals. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich put it best when he responded to Dean’s assertion that reconciliation is a viable option for getting this passed.

“But if you want to see why the — why a substantial number of Americans are very frightened, that’s a good example. The Senate rules on passing reconciliation were clearly designed for budget items.If we’re now going to try to rewrite 17 percent of the economy, life and death for every American, by pretending that massive health reform is a reconciliation item and ramming it through with 51 votes, first of all, I don’t think — I think a lot of Senate Democrats (inaudible) I think the idea of stripping the Senate of its ability as a Senate to operate with some sense of discretion andramming through something on this size will go down very badly with many senators, will go down very badly with much of the country.”

For this reason, while I agree with Limbaugh that President Obama is committed to a public option, despite hints to the contrary at his town hall this weekend and from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, I cannot believe that this stepping back, at least on the surface, from the public option was planned all along just to sneak it back into the bill at the last minute.

Instead, I believe that the White House will continue to push for the public option, even given its slim chances of getting passed in the Senate. I think it will continue to regroup and try to refocus its message to focus on the evil insurance companies, in an effort to reframe the debate. And, if the House and Senate pass very different-looking bills, I’m not sure what will happen during a conference committee – or rather, if anything meaningful would actually get passed in such a committee, although something labelled as ‘health care reform’ would surely get passed to save face. Perhaps these public cooperatives are just another means toward the same end as Rick Moran explores in his new AIP column. As Rahm Emanuel has said, “The goal is non-negotiable; the path is negotiable.” Health care opponents shouldn’t get their hopes up until the public option is completely off the table.

*Originally published August 18, 2009 on the American Issues Project Blog, here.

Tags: health care debate, public option, reconciliation