Last week, activists crashed a meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans, singing about the death of the public option to the tune of “The Sun’ll Come Out” from Annie.
Their song appears to have been just a bit premature.
Yesterday, Harry Reid, the (justly) oft-criticized Senate majority leader, announced that he would include a public option in the final health care bill that comes to the Senate floor for a vote. Since multiple committees passed a bill on to the full Senate, the final bill will be a compromise between them—and it appears that Olympia Snowe, the sole Republican willing to even consider any health legislation at all, won’t get her say after all.
Snowe wanted “triggers,” benchmarks that if not met by the insurance companies after the multimillion -dollar gift that health reform will likely be to them, would push the public option into existence. This patently ridiculous idea was not just a way to push responsibility down the road further, it was clearly a way to kill the public option. And Harry Reid, who does after all preside over a theoretical filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, has decided that rather than banking on Snowe he’s going to dare the members of his own party to join a Republican filibuster of a policy that still finds favor with 57% of Americans.
Instant irrelevance for Snowe, and a big kiss-off to the bipartisanship fetish.
Progressives justifiably cheered. Chris Hayes wrote at The Nation:
But with the opt-out public option included in the unamended floor-bill, opponents of the public option will now have to get 60 votes to pass their own amendment killing it, and they don’t have those votes either. This means that the opt-out public option will almost certainly be in the final bill that comes up for a vote in the full senate. That’s huge, since the house will also have a public option (an even stronger one, without the opt-out provision).
With Reid’s announcement, the way is clear for President Obama to finally stop hedging and start arm-twisting, whipping his party the same way he has for war funding. This is the line in the sand.
Granted, this isn’t the line in the sand that most of us would like. The “opt-out” measure significantly weakens the public option, and will most likely punish people in so-called “Red” states, with heavily Republican state governments—many of which are also some of the country’s poorest, with the fewest people insured. South Carolina, for instance, home of the stimulus-refusing Mark Sanford, has 19% of its population without health insurance. The majority of those people are rural and nonwhite—the same people so often forgotten in this country.
Opt-out shifts responsibility down to the states—it forces them to decide whether denying poor people health care on some sort of principle (that usually stems from insurance and drug company dollars) is worth the ire of their voters. Democrats who support it are betting that state politicians won’t actually be able to get away with opting out, because the public option relies on size to control costs. They’re hoping that at a state level, popular support for a public option will rule the day.
Still, this announcement is cause for celebration not just because Harry Reid decided to essentially tell Olympia Snowe to go trigger herself. It’s a moment for progressives to stop and to realize that our action has made a difference. In August, when town hall protesters held the headlines hostage, it would’ve been easy for progressives to give up, roll over, like the White House has seemed at times willing to do. Instead, they dug in. The majority of Democrats might not have been willing to fight for single-payer, but other people did, and direct actions like the AHIP singers and CIGNA sit-ins were backed up by phone calls to Congress and fundraising efforts to benefit members of Congress willing to take a stand for the public option.
It’s not a mass movement yet—but the fight isn’t over, either. Reid’s announcement leaves a lot of leeway, and the bill has to pass a Senate vote. The House has to produce its own version, which is likely to contain a stronger public option without opt-outs, and the two bills will have to be combined into something that goes to Obama. There will be a need for more action, more phone calls, more sit-ins, more fundraising and pressure. It must be politically impossible for Democrats-in-name-only like Ben Nelson or rejected Democrat Joe Lieberman to join a Republican filibuster.
The fight is just getting started, and there will be more to come in its wake. But the fact that wavering Democrats seem suddenly to be willing to take a stand is indeed a victory for progressives who refused to give up and go home. The fact that we have any sort of a public option alive at this moment is because of us, because we didn’t sit back and wait for elected officials to take the lead.
That’s worth singing about.