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- Now that the public option, triggers, opt-outs and buy-ins have been felled by a Senate without 60 votes and a White House eager to sign the bill and move on, the question is whether what remains of health-care reform is any good. On the activist side of the debate, I'd say the consensus is that passing no bill would be better than passing a bill without a public option. Among progressive wonks and disinterested observers, the pragmatic, glass-half-full perspective is that a dead health-care reform bill benefits no one, particularly Democrats who really ought to be worrying more about enacting reform that takes effect immediately.
- Inadvertently, the focus on the public option and its eventual defeat allowed the other elements of the reform bill to survive relatively unscathed (insofar as they were not the targets of months-long assaults). But now the Senate gets to hear a stream of amendments (I'm intellectually curious as to how many votes single-payer gets) and then muster those 60 votes. The real worry is what will emerge from the conference committee to merge the House and Senate bills. Although the committee process won't be subject to amendments, it won't matter if even more concessions are acceded to in conference.
- Setting aside the symbolic importance of the public option -- and I don't deny that its existence would go some ways toward reversing the public's long-held skepticism of government programs -- it should be noted that the public option was never designed to be open to everybody. Its scope was limited, its pool small, and it would have mostly been off-limits to the healthy and already-insured. This, along with the political cost of failure, is reason enough to hold my nose and support a bill that at least will regulate private insurance and subsidize care (read: increase coverage) and at most can be improved in the future.
- Remainders: It doesn't look like Joe Lieberman is going to lose influence any time soon; nothing good can come of the DOD's incredible surge in defense contractors; the sooner everyone agrees bipartisanship is a fiction, the better off this country will be; and why am I not shocked by these poll results?
--Mori Dinauer
