Just saw this over at FiveThirtyEight.com and a search here turned up no diaries on it so I thought I'd take a swing at summarizing it. More below the flip.
Nate Silver breaks it down in his customary dispassionate way, acknowledging that the support is just not there, nor has it likely been there from the start.
We estimated based on committee votes that a bill containing a fairly weak public option -- like the one approved by the House's Energy and Commerce Committee -- would be a favorite to pass the House but probably only by a slim margin, with between 220-225 votes for passage (a minimum of 218 are required). And arguably, the conditions have worsened somewhat for health care reform since the Commerce Committee's compromise passed on July 31st.
It's worse on the Senate side with only 37 Senators in favor according to the whip count posted on Howard Dean's site.
Keep in mind that, even if a bill with a public option made it to the Senate floor, it would be subject to an amendment that could strip that provision. Considering that virtually all of the 40 Republicans would vote for such an amendment, it would only need perhaps 10-12 Democratic votes to pass, something which it could quite possibly achieve. Now, progressives could try to filibuster that amendment. But if they did so, senators like Landrieu and Ben Nelson could then filibuster the overall bill with a clear conscience (or at least a good excuse).
Given all that, should progressive Democrats put the whole thing out of its misery and kill it? Should it instead become a campaign issue for 2010 with the hope that more Republican losses (3rd cycle in a row) will push the balance far enough along to pass it in the next Congress?
Or should Democrats close ranks around a bill that does the following:
- Ensures that no American could be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition or because they became sick;
- Subsidizes health insurance coverage for millions of poor and middle-class Americans
Silver suggests the latter: that Dems should pass that bill and not scuttle the whole thing:
Bill Clinton suggested on Thursday that the President's approval rating would get a five-point boost the moment that health care legislation passed with his signature. I don't know if that's exactly right, but this is certainly a better scenario for Democrats than the world in which health care reform fails and they're getting blamed by pretty much everybody and have nothing much to run on in 2010.
And/But does the Progressive Caucus have the juice to kill a bill without a robust public option?
If they want to, they probably can. We estimated earlier that a bill with a weak public option would garner about 220-225 votes in the House, assuming no liberal objections. Perhaps a bill with no public option at all could do a bit better -- maybe 230 to 240 votes, gaining some ground among Blue Dogs and a maybe a very few moderate Republicans. That would mean that you'd only need between about 15-25 progressives voting against such a bill to block passage; FireDogLake reports that they've already found 12 who are willing to do so.
But I'm not sure where that would leave progressives. If you re-inserted a public option, you might lose as many Blue Dog votes as you gained back from progressives. Even if you managed to avoid that, the public option would probably get killed by the Senate. Maybe you could gamble on a bill with a public option passing the House, a bill without one passing the Senate, and then the House bill winning the floor fight on the conference report. But this is usually not what happens. Instead, the Senate tends to win floor fights over conference reports, since they can filibuster them.
I find that to be very frustrating but it's hard to argue with the numbers.
What about passing a stand-alone public option bill?
[I]f someone...proposed a public option -- a provision that would spare $150 billion from the public dole and which would give consumers more choices -- it would seem to have a fairly compelling case. Part of the problem the public option faces is that it's a somewhat popular, cost-reducing measure which is mired in a somewhat unpopular, thousand-page, $900 billion bill. When taken as a standalone measure, its cost savings would be more transparent and its opponents would have less ability to confuse the public about its costs and benefits.
So there you have it from Nate Silver: a dispassionate look at the realistic chances of a robust option surviving the legislative process in 2009.