I am as miserable as the rest of you about the impending death of the public option, but I am also trying to be cognizant of the facts and the reality and looking to save what we can. I have a lot of trust and faith in Nate Silver's analyses (both for Baseball and politics) and his take is simply that we don't have the votes (Read below or better yet read the whole thing yourself).
This is excruciating and I hate confronting this, yet we may just have to face the facts that it is also reality. What then can we salvage out of this? What is our rallying cry? I would suggest that what remains is to insist on a trigger.
What is a trigger? Simply put, it is a provision or set of provisions that would create the public option in the future if certain milestones were not met. Co-ops with a public trigger were the initial compromise option before we on the left rejected it as being under-ambitious.
Nate's take
It's the Senate side, though, where the public option was encountering most of its difficulties. Only 37** Senators, according to the whip count at Howard Dean's website, were firmly on board with the public option, whereas at least a few Democrats (Mary Landrieu, Joe Lieberman, Kent Conrad) had stipulated their opposition to it. (** EDIT: The information at the Dean website appears to be somewhat out of date. More recent counts show something like 43-45 Dems in favor.) There were nevertheless a number of scenarios under which one can imagine a bill with a public option having passed -- Lieberman, Landrieu, et. al. might be nominally opposed to a public option, but is their opposition so firm that they would vote to filibuster any bill that contained one?
[snip]
You'd think that a provision that is both fairly popular and money-saving was a good bet for passage. But the insurance industry really, really does not like the public option. We'd previously estimated that its lobbying influence has cost the public option something like nine (9) votes in the Senate.
This is an unpleasant truth. But just because it's an unpleasant truth doesn't mean that it's not the truth.
What is important now is to keep our eye on the ball. Much can happen in he small hours before a bill is signed. You may recall that the entirety of the "Commodity Futures Modernization Act" the most substantive change to our financial regulation system in over 50 years was passed as a rider with little to no floor debate. Could we pass a robust public trigger in a similar manner? Potentially if we are disciplined.
If so, what should we be asking for from such a trigger? I'd suggest three things
- It should be short in duration? i.e. We'd like a three year trigger not a seven year trigger.
- It should trigger automatically without requiring a vote.
- It should trigger based on objective measures, as calculated by either the GAO or the CBO.
- Potentially (if we need to compromise further to get it through) it can be phased in in waves provided what is phased in is a true public option such as the ability to buy into Medicare.
I know people are devastated by the turn in events, but it is important to keep our eye on the ball and salvage what we can. A public option in three years is nearly as good as a public option in 3 months.