AP is reporting that the Gang of Ten has reached an agreement that drops the opt-out public option.
Democratic senators say they have a tentative deal to drop a government-run insurance option from healthcare legislation....
But liberals and moderates have been discussing an alternative, including a private insurance arrangement to be supervised by the federal agency that oversees the system through which lawmakers purchase coverage. Additionally, talks centered on opening Medicare to uninsured Americans beginning at age 55, a significant expansion of the large government healthcare program that currently serves the over-65 population.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told reporters he didn't like the agreement but would support it to the hilt in an attempt to pass healthcare legislation.
Additionally, Olbermann is reporting that Reid has confirmed the agreement (no link found yet).
If Tom Harkin doesn't like it, chances are pretty good that the reports are correct and the public option is gone. Additionally, the Wonk Room tweets that Carper reports the provision has been sent to CBO for scoring.
According to Rockefeller, the Medicaid expansion that was under consideration has been ruled out, that's one significant element of the negotiations and expansion of the program in lieu of a public option gone. On the other hand, apparently a 2010 start date for the Medicare buy-in received significant support. No confirmation yet whether that's the deal.
Apparently Lieberman is OK with the buy-in, as long as the public option is out. President Snowe is opposed, but Nelson and Landrieu have given their ok. Hopefully Nelson's OK isn't contingent upon a deal on his abortion effort.
The House should absolutely reject the effort to drop the conference of the bill and ping-pong it. Remember all those promises about "we'll fix it in conference"? Yeah. We need to go to conference on this, however much the White House wants to have this passed by the State of the Union.
There's ongoing discussion in math4barack's diary.
And an immediate update. Rachel Maddow is reporting on this Reuters story in which Reid denies the public option trade-off.
We have a broad agreement," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told reporters, refusing to give any details on the talks.
Reid said reports the government-run "public option" had been dropped were "not true."
Is that a question of how Reid is interpreting "public option," or is it still in? Again, stay tuned for updates as we find out more....
Update 2: The NY Times Prescription blog has some more details:
But Democratic aides said that the group had tentatively agreed on a proposal that would replace a government-run health care plan with a menu of new national, privately-run insurance plans modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers more than eight million federal workers, including members of Congress, and their dependents.
A government-run plan would be retained as a fall-back option, the aides said, and would be triggered only if the new proposal failed to meet targets for providing affordable insurance coverage to a specified number of people.
The agreement would also allow Americans between age 55 and 64 to buy coverage through Medicare, beginning in 2011.
Great, the compromise for a strong public option is even more private plans. That triggered, maybe public option could be the public option Reid said was still in there. If it's an extremely robust public option, and the trigger is set at a level that could really be triggered, well, it's silly to speculate on that because the ConservaDems would never have agreed to that.
A Senate leadership aide tells me that "there is a public option in the compromise," but won't be able to provide more details until it is scored by the CBO.
