TNR's Jonathon Cohn reports that TNR's Capitol Hill source confirms the Politico story that the White House is pressuring Reid to give into Lieberman's demands.
But one of TNR's Capitol Hill sources is saying the same thing that Politico's is. According to the source, the message came directly from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: Lose the Medicare buy-in, reach an accommodation with Lieberman, and pass legislation as soon as possible.
Ryan Grim at HuffPo also confirms it:
Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation said.
Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, has long been identified as leading a faction of White House advisers who have been pushing the Senate simply to pass any health care bill, no matter how weak.
His direct message to Reid (D-Nev.), according to a source close to the negotiations: "Get it done. Just get it done."
Back to just getting it done, and the talk about whether or not the Senate should go with reconciliation. Ezra writes about it:
What would be eligible? Well, Medicare buy-in, for one thing. Medicaid expansions. The public option. Anything, in short, that relies on a public program, rather than a new regulation in the private market. That means we'd probably lose the regulations on insurers, many of the delivery-side reforms, the health insurance exchanges, the individual mandate and much else.
Reconciliation, in other words, tips the bill towards an expansion of the public sector rather than a restructuring of the private sector. That makes it much less congenial to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans (not to mention more conservative Republicans). But it also doesn't need as many of their votes, as it can pass the Senate with 50, rather than 60, in support.
To be very clear, this is not a trade I'm eager to see reformers make. You lose too much in reconciliation, and gain too little. The exchanges are too important, and so too are the insurance regulations and delivery-system reforms. But if Democrats end up in reconciliation, this bill is going to get a lot worse from the perspective of its skeptics."
But are the exchanges more important, right now, in the midst of the crisis we are in, than extending coverage through Medicaid, Medicare, and the public option? This morning Ezra also wrote:
By now, you're probably used to hearing about the $900 billion health-care bill. But what about the 150,000-life health-care bill?
Oddly, that label hasn't made its way into the conversation. But it is, if anything, a conservative estimate. The Institute of Medicine developed a detailed methodology for projecting the lives lost due to lack of insurance. The original paper estimated that 18,000 lives were lost in 2000, and the Urban Institute updated that analysis with data for 2006, yielding an estimate of 22,000 lives. As for 150,000, well, that's almost certainly too low. That's just the 2006 number across 10 years, which is the time frame we generally use for health care, with a third of the lives saved lopped off, as we're not going to cover all of the uninsured. But since the population of the uninsured grows every year, and so does the death toll, it would surely be higher. So call it the 150,000-plus-life health-care plan.
At this point, the assistance to the people who need it most is the critical moral and policy decision. Would it be a band-aid? Yes, but even a band-aid can staunch bleeding, and right now that's what we desperately need. The insurance reforms matter a great deal, too, and can be passed through regular process. It will be a lot harder for Senators to stand up and vote to allow insurance companies to continue to deny coverage to the American people.
Now that Medicare buy-in and the public option have been sacrificed at the altar of Joe, there's still the problem of Nelson and Stupak hanging out there, a proposal that could do more long-term harm to the nation's women than those market reforms could bring. Stripping this bill down to the core assistance to the uninsured might be the last saving grace it could have.
