Barack Obama is very supportive of the public option but he has decided to wage the battle BEHIND the scenes instead of in front of the camera. According to the LA Times, Obama has been working with Senators to craft a public option that will pass the Senate as well as the House. Time will tell if pushing hard behind the scenes as oppose to blaring for it in front of the camera is the better approach.
http://www.latimes.com/...
(FYI, the Chicago Tribune over the weekend also had an article about the White House pushing for a public option behind the scenes.)
Barack Obama campaigned on affordable health care for all and he did include a public option as a means of achieving that goal.
In the Spring Obama was very forceful on the public option but by the end of the Summer Obama appeared to be backing down and publically appeared to be accepting of all views.Reporting from Washington - Despite months of outward ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea for a final vote in the coming weeks.
President Obama has cited a preference for the so-called public option. But faced with intense criticism over the summer, he strategically expressed openness to health cooperatives and other ways to offer consumers potentially more affordable alternatives to private health plans.
I suspect Obama did this for a couple of reasons:
- In a case the public option didn't become part of health care reform then even if a HISTORIC health care reform bill was passed, his critics would have said he still lost because since there was no public option in the bill.
- The insurance industries were lobbying hard against the public option on the Hill thus back acting like Obama was backing off and open to other ideas, perhaps the insurance industry wouldn't be pressing so hard.
Well now we know that Obama is very supportive of the public option and not only believes that it is good policy but it is good politics. As a result, Obama is doing what we all believe he should which is channel his inner LBJ and twist arms and make deals with Senators about the public option in the backrooms as LBJ did.
In the last week, however, senior administration officials have been holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the healthcare bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to bring to the Senate floor this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides.
Among those regularly in the meetings are Obama's top healthcare advisor, Nancy-Ann DeParle; aides to Reid; and staff from the Senate Finance and Health committees, both of which developed healthcare bills.
Obama is working with Senators to craft a public option that will pass the Senate and has been pushing hard behind the scenes for the public option.
When Obama spoke by phone with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) last week, he made a point of the breadth of support for the public option, she said in an interview. Cantwell authored a proposal to let states set up public plans, which Democrats added to the Senate Finance Committee bill on Wednesday.
And when Pennsylvania Democrats came to the White House recently to celebrate the Pittsburgh Penguins' Stanley Cup win, Obama pulled some of them aside and reiterated his commitment to the public option even as Baucus was preparing a bill without one.
Democratic leaders are also working hard on twisting arms of conservative Democrats.
New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, the chamber's third-ranking Democrat, has been canvassing centrist Democrats to explore ways they might support a new government plan.
"I have talked to every one of our conservative members and they are open to some kind of public option," he told reporters last week.
And at a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats on Tuesday, Assistant Majority Leader Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) marshaled polling data from districts represented by conservative Democrats that showed a majority would back the requirement that Americans get health insurance so long as there was a public option.
"To argue that this is some fringe position is to ignore the obvious," Durbin said.
As I stated above, the White House feels that this is not only good policy but good politics. The Democratic energy is really behind the public option. The White House knows that right now the GOP base is MORE energized than the Democratic base which could be a huge problem in the mid-terms. Many Democratic strategists believe that including a public option will energize the base not only to come out and vote but to donate much needed money for the battle of 2010.
Although the conservative Democrats have been very resistent to a national public option plan, they have expressed openess for one that is not national that is why Cantrell's amendment got 12 Democratic votes in the Senate Finance committee and Carper's approach on letting the States decide is gaining steam.
But Obama and Reid are treading carefully, wary of including a provision that would scare off moderates such as Snowe, Nelson and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who have all indicated they would not support a national public plan.
Besides Snowe's trigger approach and Cantwell's proposal, an alternative is being considered from Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) that would also give states flexibility to set up their own public plans.
Ezra Klein has looked at Carper's public option plan and he has concluded that it is much better than Snowe's trigger. I personally think that it could be effective as well. If some of the blue states got together and enacted their public option ie New York, New Jersey, other east coast blue states and on the west cost California, Washington, Oregon, etc and they bundled up, they really could be a POWERFUL force to keep health insurance costs down. Remember many of the blue states are the ones with the big populations (except for Texas) as oppose to the red states which are small population states ie Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, etc. As a result, I think that Carper's public option plan is worth exploring.
The bottom line is that the public option is NOT dead and thus Democrats who are for it should continue to press their Senators and House members hard on it.