The moral case for the public option in health care reform has been well-made by numerous Democratic leaders, activists and writers, and some have also made a persuasive case that it’s good political strategy. Robert Parry’s Consortium News post, via Alternet, takes the argument a step further; that the public option is not only politically-wise; it should be implemented on a faster track — or the Democrats could be risking “electoral disaster.” As Parry explains:

Indeed, if the Democrats abandon the public option for the sake of passing a bill like the one that came out of the Senate Finance Committee, they may be courting electoral disaster once voters grasp that they will have to wait years for the law to be implemented and then that it could lead to higher costs for much the same unpopular private insurance plans.
…As the legislation stands now, many of the key features that hold some promise of helping consumers – such as the “exchange” where individuals and small business would shop for the best product – won’t even take effect until 2013. That means that Americans now facing the crisis of no health insurance won’t get much help for another four years, if then.
…By contrast to the four-year phase-in for these relatively modest reforms, the Medicare single-payer program for senior citizens was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965, and was up and running less than a year later.
..The implementing delays mean that in both 2010 and 2012, Republicans will be free to make the truthful case that the Democrats – despite their promises – had accomplished little to help the American people on health care. Already, Republican senators are using the talking point that the four-year delay is part of a budgetary trick to make the bill appear cheaper over 10 years than it would be if its key features took effect quickly.

Parry believes the implementation delays of both the insurance exchanges and public option ‘trigger’ could work against each other to an even more deleterious effect:

…But the insurance exchanges won’t open until 2013, so it may take years before any trigger would be pulled. At minimum, the industry would have earned a lengthy reprieve.
And by the time, the exchanges have a chance to be tested, Congress and the White House could be in Republican hands. If that’s the case, the Republicans might well undo even the triggered public option. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans would surely not worry about ramming their preferred policy through the Congress.

Conversely, Parry sees a huge upside to a bolder implementation strategy:

On the other hand, if Congress enacts a public option now, it presumably could be implemented at least as fast as Medicare, especially if it were piggybacked onto the existing Medicare bureaucracy. That would enable Democrats to show they had accomplished something beneficial for the public before voters go to the polls in November 2010.
By 2012, if the CBO predictions of substantial savings prove true, Obama could campaign for reelection on the basis that he had improved the welfare of the American people — and the budget outlooks for government and business.

It would be bitterly ironic if Democrats enacted a strong health care reform bill, with a solid public option, but then suffered political damage because it was implemented too late to do us some good. Parry makes a compelling case that putting implementation of both a public option and health exchanges on a faster track is wise strategy.

Just a hearty Amen and an addendum to Ed Kilgore’s post below, which provides one of the most crucial insights of the entire health care reform debate going on among Democrats: Every Democratic senator must be put on record — and soon — as supporting the party on cloture, no matter which health reform bill he or she advocates.
This has to be the first flashpoint at which Democratic leaders invoke party discipline, particularly when the stakes are the most important legislative reform in many decades. This is our line in the sand, where the emphasis should now be for all Democrats who care about health care reform and their party’s integrity.
And let all rank and file Democrats agree on one thing, if nothing else — that any Democratic senator who betrays the Party on a critical cloture procedural vote will get exceptionally well-funded primary opposition, regardless of his or her approval numbers. And may all progressive bloggers, journalists and activists pledge their hearts, souls and firstborn to the cause of denouncing cloture turncoats as shameless sell-outs for the rest of their miserable days.

In recent weeks President Obama has absorbed a volley of hits from progressives who are disssatisfied with his caution on a wide array of policies, including Afghanistan, the public option and bail-outs, to list a few (as reported for example, in Ed Hornick’s CNN.com post, “Candidate vs. boss: Obama’s ship not so tight these days, some say“). But the progressive cause may be better-served by taking a step back and considering his accomplishments in a broader historical context. Peter Beinart, senior fellow at the New America Foundation. and a former New Republic editor, does just that in his latest Daily Beast post, “Liberals Lay off Obama.” As Beinart explains,

…Our do-nothing president did something that Democratic presidents have been trying to do for most of the last century: He celebrated a universal health care bill’s passage through Senate Committee. For good measure, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time since last fall’s meltdown. Obama’s polling has even ticked up: According to Gallup, he’s more popular than he’s been since summer…Even this summer, when the press was announcing a dip in Obama’s fortunes, the health care bills were moving steadily through Congress, the stimulus was gradually slowing the nation’s economic descent, and Obama’s approval ratings never fell below 50 percent…Get ready for the “Obama comeback” stories, in which the same publications that recently declared that “he’s failing miserably” (Politico) and “suddenly looking unsure of himself” (The Economist) discover that he’s thriving again. But the boring truth is that he was pretty much thriving all along.

Beinart attributes Obama’s sagging image, despite his accomplishments, to the media’s penchant for exagerating trends in roller-coaster fashion to heighten a story’s drama. But he believes Obama will ultimately be judged “against a low bar” — the disaster created by his predecessor. Even if Dems get “clobbered” in the mid-terms, Beinart believes, Obama should be looking pretty solid by 2012, when the stimulus will be showing positive results. Beinart continues:

So liberals should stop complaining that Obama hasn’t done anything. Sure, he hadn’t yet done much to bring world peace, but the stimulus bill — which includes vast sums for college tuition, renewable energy and mass transit — is one of the most important pieces of progressive domestic legislation in decades. And if Obama twins that with health care reform, he’ll have done more to rebuild the American welfare state in one year than his two Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did in a combined twelve.

For drama-seeking journalists, Beinart concludes, “The dreary truth is that politically, Obama is both lucky and good, and he’s well on his way to a successful first term.” Beinart’s big-picture analysis sounds plausible enough, and if he is right, the grumbling Dems of today will likely become Obama’s champions of tomorrow.

It is encouraging that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe (ME) joined in supporting the Senate Finance Committee version of health care reform, setting an admirable, albeit lonely example of bipartisanship in the 14-9 vote. As WaPo‘s Chris Cilliza suggests in ‘The Fix,’ Snowe’s vote could be significant in another way — inspiring hesitant Democrats to stand up for consumers against the worst instincts of the health care industry.
For the best report thus far on the SFC vote and it’s ramifications, read The Washington Post‘s coverage by Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray. Read also Chris Bowers’ easy-to-follow explanation of the legislative process regarding health care reform going forward.
It’s not such great news that a solid public option did not make the SFC cut. Nor is there much cause for celebration in the committee’s approval of nonprofit, consumer-run cooperatives to instead perform that role. In addition, agreement on the financing of health care reform is no closer as a result of the committee’s vote. According to the Posts’ coverage, the SFC version is a disappointment to some progressives because,

The measure does not mandate that businesses provide coverage to their workers. Committee members defeated two versions of a government insurance option. And the bill would tax high-value policies that, to the dismay of many liberal lawmakers, could affect some union households.

However, the good, make that great news is that all relevant Senate committees have now approved health care reform legislation that caps out of pocket spending by consumers at a reasonable level, bans disqualification from coverage based on prior medical condition and increases by millions the number of citizens covered. As Montgomery’s and Murray’s article notes, “Not since Theodore Roosevelt proposed universal health care during the 1912 presidential campaign has any such bill come this far.” Adds House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), “We are much closer than we’ve ever been. I think we’re going to make it.
A range of creative compromises regarding the public or co-op options are still in play, including Snowe’s ‘trigger mechanism,’ state public options or some hybrid version, perhaps even widened access to ‘health exchanges,’ as Sen. Ron Wyden has proposed, all of which would be better than what we have now. Regrettably, the single-payer option remains d.o.a. — although single-payer for catastrophic coverage only could be proposed as an amendment before the deal is done.
Although the white house and congressional leaders would have welcomed more than token bipartisanship, Democrats should not hesitate to use the Republicans’ nearly unanimous obstructionist front against them, if need be. They can grumble, gripe and whine all they want. Democrats need only keep reminding the press and public that majority rule is the American way.

John Harwood’s Sunday New York Times article, “Democrats Must Attack to Win in 2010, Strategists Say” provides a good summation of the argument that Democrats are going to have to play rougher than usual to minimize losses next year. Harwood draws from the views of ‘nonpartisan political handicapper’ Charlie Cook and Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who urges Dems not to “defend and justify,” but instead make Republican obstructionism “a central part of the debate.” Harwood lays out some sobering numerical realities to show why a more aggressive posture for Dems is needed:

,,,Democrats currently have 28 House seats in jeopardy to the Republicans’ 14; 7 Senate seats to Republicans’ 6; 13 governorships to Republicans’ 9…In last month’s New York Times/CBS News Poll, nearly 8 in 10 Americans rated the economy as fairly or very bad. That is only a modest improvement from a year ago…In a recent Gallup survey, independent voters preferred Republican candidates for Congress by 45 percent to 36 percent; last October, they favored Democratic candidates 46 percent to 39 percent.

As Cook, who gives Dems a slight edge in holding the House next year, says in Harwood’s article, “They’re going to have to play really rough…For the average Democratic Congressional incumbent, the opposition researcher will be the most important person in the campaign.”
For Garin, the image of the GOP as “completely obstructionist” provides a powerful vulnerability for Dems to mine over the next year, a view strongly affirmed in poll data in our recent staff post on the latest DCorps ‘Public Polling Report.’ Cook also emphasizes “the key thing is to disqualify your opponent on a very personal, individual level.” Harwood also quotes Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who says Dems must “make the opponent the issue…tie them to George Bush — and then make it personal,” using “our playbook.”
Harwood writes about the comeback gubernatorial campaigns of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and Virginia Democratic nominee R. Creigh Deeds, both of whom have gained substantial ground by intensifying their attacks on their opponents. Corzine has scored by nailing his opponent for using his personal leverage to avoid traffic tickets, while Deeds has hammered his adversary for extremist views expressed in a college paper. I haven’t seen the ads of the Deeds campaign, nor clips of his attacks, but it’s hard to imagine him getting much lasting traction from an opponent’s college paper.
The ‘less defense, more offense’ strategy makes good sense in the current political environment, as was instructively illustrated most recently by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL). Grayson got great coverage by refusing to defend himself for what those sensitive Republicans saw as uncivil, and by seizing the media moment and going on the attack. But it’s important to remember that, more often, it takes money — lots of it for TV ads — to attack effectively. No matter how tough a candidate’s attacks, Dems can’t assume the media will report it adequately.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there are limits to what Harwood calls “winning ugly.” It’s more a matter of tone than content. Attacks must be tough and thorough, but without crossing the line into nasty, mean-spirited or petty. There is always a point at which the object of an attack can win sympathy. My guess is Rep. Grayson plays this card artfully, stopping just short of this point of diminishing returns.
To hold the line in the midterm elections, the next year must be a time of intensified Democratic attacks. As Paul Waldman, author of Being Right Is Not enough: What Progressives Can learn from Conservative Success, put it in a TomPaine.com post, “Democrats, Don’t Wimp Out,” :

Democrats should wake up every day thinking, “How can we keep Republicans on the run?” Never give them a moment’s rest, never let them advance their agenda, keep them on the defensive so they have to apologize for being the standard-bearers of a discredited ideology and a disgraced president. Do that, and every legislative battle and election to come will be that much more likely to swing in your favor.

That’s solid advice in any political year, and in 2010 in particular it could make the difference between political gridlock and a new era of Democratic accomplishments.

It’s fun to imagine the shocked expressions in the dark precincts, where toil writers for Human Events, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, Fox News etc. on learning that President Barack Obama will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Rest assured that they will be deploying the most rancid vitriol at their disposal throughout the day.
Sure, we’re all surprised. But this is likely to drive wing-nuts over the edge, or at least the few who haven’t already succumbed to Obama derangement syndrome. Expect denunciations of the Nobel Committee, heightened whining about Obama’s ‘free ride’ with Euro-liberals, splenetic critiques of his foreign policy etc. It’s all in the oven.
They will certainly say that the Nobel Peace Prize is just another liberal doo-dad, not mentioning of course that Republicans and conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, George C. Marshall, Elihu Root, Meachem Begin, F. W. de Klerk and others are counted among previous recipients.
They will pooh-pooh the notion of giving the world’s most prestigious award to a leader who has been in office less than 10 months. Heck, they will say, President Carter didn’t get his Nobel Peace Prize until 20 years after his presidency.
Surprised as even progressives may be, Obama’s selection makes good sense. He has enkindled new hope around the world that the planet’s greatest military and economic power now has sane, prudent leadership. Though many were caught off guard when he went to Cairo and addressed the Arab world, it was seen as the most sincere effort ever made by an American leader to promote healing in the Middle East. Citing President Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland put it this way at the press conference announcing Obama’s selection:

We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do…He has created a new international climate…One of the first things he did was to go to Cairo to try to reach out to the Muslim world, then to restart the Mideast negotiations and then he reached out to the rest of the world through international institutions…The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons…Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play

And further,

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population…
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’

The political strategy implications of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize should be considerable. It gives him added leverage in foreign affairs. It puts his critics in regrettable harmony with leaders of terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad, one of whom said in the afore-linked NYT article that Obama’s selection “shows these prizes are political, not governed by the principles of credibility, values and morals.”
It’s hard to say how much the Nobel selection will help in terms of Obama’s domestic agenda, but it can’t hurt and it certainly adds lustre to photo-ops with the President, who already enjoyed a substantial margin of approval over congressional Democrats and even more so over Republicans. Who knows, it just may encourage a Republican or two to think about building a more impressive legacy than that of being a toady for the health care industry.

Most of the media buzz about bipartisanship, or rather the lack thereof, has focused on criticizing the Democrats for not reaching out to their adversaries, while giving the Republicans a free ride regarding their intransigence. Yet, during the last decade or so, a tally of votes in congress would almost certainly show that a lot more Democrats have voted for legislation sponsored by Republicans than vice-versa.
Grudgingly, you have to give the Republicans an “A” for party discipline, which is another way of saying the modern GOP has become a party of mostly inflexible ideologues. But there are some signs that, maybe, just maybe, the ranks are begining to break a bit, at least on the issue of health care reform. In today’s WaPo, for example, Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly have an article, “Reform Gets Conditional GOP Support,” noting

And in the past two days, former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist; George W. Bush health and human services secretary Tommy G. Thompson and Medicare chief Mark McClellan; California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — a Republican turned independent — have all spoken favorably of overhauling the nation’s health-care system, if couched with plenty of caveats regarding the details.
The White House lobbying campaign was aimed, in part, at the one Republican who has indicated she may vote for reform legislation, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), and she said Tuesday that she hopes the comments from her GOP colleagues will resonate.

Give a listen to Bill Frist, who is a surgeon, pretty much endorsing a triggered public option with ‘local control’ in this CNN clip. Even at (gasp) Fox News, there are stirrings of sanity towards health care reform, as anchor Shep Smith steps up to shred Republican Senator John Barrasso (WY) for his knee-jerk opposition to the public option in this surprising clip at TPM.
In her article at Daily Kos, “Not All Republicans Are on the Train to Crazy Town,” McJoan adds former Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker and former GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole to the pro-reform list, wondering if,

Maybe it’s their message to their folks on the Hill that, while there may be short term gain with keeping the base riled up for 2010, ending up on the wrong side of history on this debate could have really damaging long term consequences….There’s nothing radical about healthcare reform, and I’d take it a step further to say there’s nothing radical about a robust public option. We’ve already got one, in the form of Medicare. Hell, we’ve already got the most “radical” form of healtcare–single payer–in America in the form of the VA system. That “radical” policy position was rejected before the debate even began, and the robust public option has been the reasonable compromise from the get-go in this debate.
Healthcare reform: the new mainstream.

Granted this is small ‘taters, considering that only Snowe has an actual vote to cast on health care reform legislation. But could it be that Republicans are starting to hear from their health care industry supporters, who are begining to think that a triggered public option may actually be their best hope for delaying the dreaded single payer system?

As our staff report below indicates, it’s looking very good for a favorable Senate Finance Committee report of the health care reform legislation this week. The Senate floor vote later on is more of a concern. The central question pre-occupying Senate-watchers and progressive health reform advocates alike is, what kind of public option, if any, is taking shape?
The answer to that question depends on the consensus-building skills of the white house and the willingness of a half-dozen or so key Senators, who have put their concerns out there, loud and clear, and who can not be expected to roll over without some face-saving concessions. They include:

Senator Ron Wyden (OR) wants much broader access to a ‘health exchange’ marketplace;
Senator Blanche Lincoln (AR) wants stronger cost-cutting measures so she can convince her middle-class constituents that they are not going to get saddled with tax hikes.
Republican Senator Olympia Snowe won’t vote for anything that even smells like a ‘public option’ without a ‘trigger’ mechanism of some kind;
Senator Maria Cantwell (WA) and Sen. Tom Carper (DE) want to localize the ‘public option’ by making it a state elective;
Senator Bill Nelson is mostly concerned about seniors, who are a large component of his FL constituency, and who are nervous about changes in the popular ‘Medicare Advantage’ programs.

It’s not hard to imagine a range of deals to make these six adequately happy. They have to be able to go back to their constituents and say in effect, “See, all that fussing I was doing has helped get changes in the reform package that address your concerns.” President Obama and his staff are working overtime to help make this doable.
Cantwell and Carper have already gotten an amendment supporting a public-private hybrid state approach passed in the Senate Finance Committee. Some form of it will have to survive the floor votes and reconciliation stages to keep them on board.
Wyden’s main concern is that access to health exchanges ought not be limited to those who can’t get employer-based coverage. He feels strongly that it is a critical element of cost-cutting, and forcing private providers to be competitve. Sounds about right to me.
As for Snowe, perhaps a ‘hair trigger’ that will enable her to say to her constituents, “This will protect the private insurers from cut-throat government insurance,” will be enough to make her comfortable with the package and still be acceptable to ‘robust’ public option advocates like WV Sen. Jay Rockefeller.
My guess is that Sen. Lincoln is the hardest to please, since she is the only Dem who voted against the Cantwell amendment in the Finance Committee. She has been hanging tough about cost-cutting and opposing tax hikes, and she is not alone, backed by several other moderate Democrats who share her views in varying extent, including Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Debby Stabenow, Joseph Lieberman and Claire McCaskill, among others. Convincing moderate-conservative constituents that major government reforms are not going to jack up their taxes has always been a very tough sell. Satisfying Lincoln and like-minded Senators is the white house’s most difficult challenge.
All of these Senators are aware that nation-wide public opinion favors some kind of a public option. In September, The Kaiser Family Foundation’s health care poll found that 57% of Americans want “public health insurance option similar to Medicare.” As Democratic strategist Paul Begala said, quoted in an article in today’s L.A. Times by Noam Levy and Janet Hook, “One of the most consistently popular ideas in the healthcare debate is the public option, more popular than health reform generally…”It’s good politics.”
The Administration’s best hole card, however, is that no one Senator wants to be the spoiler who gets lambasted for killing reform prospects that could save the lives of countless thousands during the next few years. Yet, understandably, none are willing to go back to their constituents empty-handed. In between these two fears there is an array of possible compromises, concessions and deals that everyone can live with. The great hope is that Team Obama can find the balances that can get to 60.

If you haven’t been following the dust-up over Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) take-down of the GOP health care “plan,” do check out this clip, posted by Open Left‘s Adam Green. Grayson responds con brio to GOP outrage over his recent remarks saying “the Republican plan is don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
Natch, the Republicans got all hufty-pufty and bent out of shape about it and are demanding an apology. But rather than cave in and grovel, Rep. Grayson is turning the brouhaha into a teachable moment, shrewdly using the media attention to hammer home the fact that the GOP really doesn’t have much of a plan, other than obstruct and crush all reform. (Also check out Grayson’s earlier refusal to apologize here). Even when CNN Situation Room anchors Gloria Bolger and Wolf Blitzer try to nail him for being uncivil, Grayson refuses to back off, and attacks the GOP’s do-nothing approach to health insurance. They try to make him eat the false equivalency of his remarks with Rep. Wilson calling the president “a liar,” but Rep. Grayson ain’t having it, and uses the opportunity to deliver another broadside against the GOP’s non-existent health care plan.
Grayson’s response to GOP protests against his remarks is instructive. First time I heard Rep. Grayson’s remarks, I winced, thinking it was a tad over the top. Dems who are squeamish about incivility and such may have problems with Grayson’s attacks. But the GOP has been getting a lot of coverage with their incivility. The way Grayson has handled it turns the controversy into a net plus. What he is doing is deploying the GOP’s media manipulation tactics to good effect, using a controversy to make a case for Democratic reform in stark contrast to Republican obstruction. It translates into more coverage for the Dem reform proposals, which have gotten squeezed off TV by various GOP bomb-throwers, like Sarah Palin. Grayson’s media strategy is don’t spend much time defending yourself; Instead, use every opportunity to attack, and that’s a good lesson for Democrats. Well-done, Rep. Grayson.

It’s a bummer that Sen. Rockefeller’s more robust public option was voted down (8-15) — almost 2-1 — in the Senate Finance Committee, despite Dems being 60 percent of the U.S. Senate. How large a majority do we need before we can pass a bill that provides a genuine public option for health insurance?
Worse, Chuck Shumer’s “level playing field” amendment, in which the public option is modified to the point where it is no drain of reimbursements from rural hospitals, also failed 10-13. (Carper and Nelson voted with the other Dems on this one.)
No doubt there will be calls for the heads of Sens. Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad, Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, who voted with the Republicans and are now being attacked around the blogosphere for being leading recipients of health insurance donations. It’s not quite fair to demonize them as rubber stamps for the Republicans, inasmuch as their most recent (’08) ADA ratings show them to be fairly progressive: Baucus 80; Carper 85; ; Conrad 90; Lincoln 80; and Nelson 75, all of which are way higher than Republican Grassley’s 25, for example. Still many, if not most, Democrats feel the public option ought to be a cornerstone of Democratic health care principles.
At this point, opponents of the public option are reduced to a version of the “slippery slope” argument, which says in essence that “even though it would not be available to all that many consumers, the public option should be opposed because it sets a bad precedent by expanding government’s role at the expense of for-profit business.” I doubt that any of the five senators actually believe this so strongly as a matter of principle; it’s more because they can get away with voting against it. Unfortunately Dems against the public option are over-represented on the Senate Finance Committee.
I understand the strong feelings of betrayal many Dems feel about the votes of the five. But after all of the splenetic denunciations of the five have been uttered, we are left with the fact that we are a Big Tent party, and tolerating differences of opinion on various legislative reforms is necessary, if we want to hold a majority. But, as Ed has persuasively argued, party discipline should kick in on cloture votes in a big way. No Democrat should be able to screw his party on a cloture vote without paying a significant price.
One thing is clear. With few exceptions, Dems have not done a great job of educating the public — to the point where these Senators would feel secure with their constituents in supporting the public option. Limp constituent education remains the Dems’ Achilles’ heel. Yes, the trifling, servile MSM bears much of the blame. But it’s still on us to do something about it.
The public option may not be toast just yet. Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery report in The Washington Post that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may insert a public option when he has to merge the Finance Committee’s bill with Senate health committee legislation (approved in July), which includes a government plan. If Reid, who Murray and Montgomery report is undecided at present, omits a public option, it’s supporters will try to amend the bill when it gets to the Senate floor. They have another shot at it during final negotiations with the House, where Speaker Pelosi, a strong public option advocate, can use her leverage to insert the provision. In addition, as Ed notes below, there is always the problematic budget reconciliation route. And who knows, a “triggered” public option amendment might gain traction before it’s all over. In any case, five Democrats ought not to be empowered to thwart the will of an overwhelming majority of Democrats — and the majority of Americans who support the public option.