Major newspapers today are reporting that the Obama administration is backing away from including a public option in health-care-reform legislation. I'm in the camp that tends to believe that the cautious language employed by officials like HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in recent days isn't actually new, nor does it necessarily signal the death of the public option. One reason is the difference between House and Senate politics. All of today's talk about shifting from a public option to a co-op arrangement emerges from the need to compromise with centrists in the Senate. In the House however, the political center is very different. There you have folks like Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York, who, like a significant number of his peers, still advocates for a single-payer system, even though that's not really on the table this time. For them, even the public option represents a compromise of sorts, so shifting even further to the right, and sanctioning co-ops is simply a bridge too far. Weiner said as much on CNBC this morning:
The president does seem like he's moving away from the public plan, andif he does, he's not going to pass a bill. Because there are just toomany people in Washington who believe that the public plan was the onlyway that you effectively bring some downward pressure on prices, and ifhe says well we're not going to have that, then I'm not really quitesure what we're dong here.
Later, Weiner said that Obama could lose the support of 100 Democrats in the House if he doesn't hold the line on the public option. What all this means is that the most interesting, and powerful, part of the health-care-reform process won't be the outcome of Max Baucus's Gang of Six negotiations. It will be what happens in conference when members try to reconcile what looks like being two very different reform bills.
