The Nuclear Public Option

TPMDC's Rachel Slada looks at the progress on passing the public option as part of Senate reconciliation and finds the road there is long...perhaps too long...to make that a reality.  Many Dem senators have come out saying the like the idea...

But the latest support rests on increasingly unstable grounds, with recent additions to the list naming multiple caveats. Sen. John Tester (D-MT), for example, said, "It depends on how it was designed." Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said he wouldn't vote for a public option that reimburses doctors at the Medicare rate. Sen. Russ Feingold's office told TPM he'd only support a public option that lowers the deficit by $25 billion.

And then there's Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), who was added to the list this Tuesday. The Huffington Post, which has been asking senators where they stand, wrote:

Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) told HuffPost that if the public insurance option comes up for a vote under reconciliation, he will vote for it it. "I would support it, yes," he said.

But when asked by TPM, Akaka's spokesman refused to commit to the effort.

"I don't want to commit him to that hypothetical because we don't think it's going to happen," said the spokesman, Jesse Broder Van Dyke. "This bill has been around for over a year now. They did push for a public option."

PCCC co-founder Adam Green admitted to TPMDC that the supporters come in three categories: staunch supporters, those who'd support it with caveats, and those, like Dorgan and Tester, who are "leaning." Tester's mild statement, Green said, "proves he's an open-minded person."

Green also said he's confident that senators who have been reluctant to sign on, including Sens. Tom Harkin and Jay Rockefeller, would do so eventually.

To that end, the Huffington Post, in a long story published Thursday, is counting a whopping 52 senators as "gettable." How do they go from PCCC's 41 senators all the way to 52? They lower the standard again, this time including those, for instance, who have voiced support for public option in the past, but have yet to sign off on passing it through reconciliation.

That's not to say the analysis is wrong. But it does require a lot of untested assumptions. And at this point, we're far beyond a clean signature on a letter.

And the reality is that nobody who has been following this expects this to ever become reality, either.  Certainly not myself.  Nor do I believe Obama will make good on his promise to revisit it in a later bill.  The simple fact of the matter is that if Obama and the Democrats were serious about passing a public option, they would.  They had the opportunity.  The language was stripped from the House bill and never even given a vote in the Senate in order to satisfy Republicans.

The laughable, pathetic part of that is of course the Republicans never had any intention of voting for health care reform no matter what was in the bill.  I warned about that a year ago, as did many others.  The advice was ignored then, and it took a year for Obama and the Dems to truly figure it out, that the Republicans really would rather destroy America's health care system in order to try to regain their political power than hand Obama such a victory.

The same logic applies to the public option:  there are simply too many Dems who refuse to vote for it.  Believing in wishful thinking will not change that salient fact.