The Obama administration is pushing furiously against a report this evening from the WSJ that is unsourced from the WH (not even anonymously) and is made with the pure intent of splitting the conservative dems from the party.
Ezra Klein on There's no plan B
The WH admits there was a plan B, shortly after MA, but it doesn't exist now. The only option is the comprehensive proposal. Those suggesting otherwise are false. The President's proposal is out, this is not it.
My thinking is that this leak came from Rahm's office (for his own reasons), but that's unlikely because call Rahm whatever you want, if the President found out that Rahm leaked this, he would be fired tomorrow.
I think this is Congressional Republicans playing games with the dems and trying to split the conservative faction from the liberal ones by suggesting that the WH is considering another option in case the comprehensive one fails.
Again, there's no sourcing from the WH on this piece. Even the administration would use anonymity if this were true. It's not and let's not pretend it is.
Here's Ezra Klein:
Plan B has been around for awhile. In August, discussions raged in the White House over whether to pare back the bill. The comprehensive folks won the argument, but people also drew up plans for how you could pare back the bill, if it came to that. More thinking was done on this in the aftermath of the Massachusetts election, when Rahm Emanuel and some of the political folks again argued for retreating to a more modest bill. As you'd expect, these conversations included proposals for how that smaller bill would look.
At this point, I could quote some White House sources swearing up and down that that's all this is. A vestigial document that's being blown out of proportion by a conservative paper interested in an agenda-setting story. They're furious over this story. None of the quotes are sourced to the White House -- not even anonymously -- raising questions that the whole thing is sabotage. But it hardly matters. There's no Plan B at this point in the game, and most everyone knows it.
Here's the Huffingtonpost: Huffingtonpost article on WH
The Journal reported that "no final decisions had been made" with regards to the Plan B approach. But one administration official who spoke to HuffPost insisted that while a fallback option had been developed, it is not even on the administration's radar.
"This proposal was developed because the president wanted to know what the impact would be if he had to go small post-Massachusetts [Senate race]. It's not where we are," the official said.
"As you can tell from covering the news this week," the official added, "this is not the proposal we're pursuing."
The president has instead -- as the administration official notes -- placed his chips behind a comprehensive package of insurance reform and coverage expansion. Based on the Senate's legislation, with fixes taken from the version passed by the House, Obama's plan would cost roughly $950 billion over the course of 10 years. It would cover more than 30 million uninsured with expansions to Medicaid, the establishment of state health insurance exchange pools, and major subsidies to help individuals purchase coverage, among other reforms.