Change – Lightning Seeds
Health care is dead because of the town halls. No wait, it’s totally revitalized because of Obama’s big speech. And in fact, it’s basically inevitable because Olympia Snowe voted for it out of committee. And look, not only is health care inevitable, but the public option is going to pass because Harry Reid grew a backbone. Or, it turns out, it’s dead because Lieberman and Nelson and Landrieu and company are against it.
My general feeling about all this is there’s a lot of fuss about the swings because we all love a news cycle, but that the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. All year I’ve assumed that health care had a strong chance of passing, but that what actually made it to Obama’s desk would be a lot weaker than the folks on the blue team would have wanted. In short, I haven’t varied too much in my best guess that odds were probably 2:1 in favor of passage, but that a public option was extremely unlikely (unless in one of its most diluted variations) and that subsidies were not going to be as high as they really needed to be.
That’s what I thought in January, in May, in August. And it’s more or less what I think now.
Perhaps the biggest real change has been the revived potential for the public option. This, I think, was genuine news. The underlying dynamics started to shift over the summer with a massive liberal pushback on this issue and the willingness of the House and Senate leadership to really work for it.
That said, I still don’t think things have tilted THAT much. It’s not that I really think any of these ‘moderates’ would be willing to take responsibility for filibustering a health care bill because it contains a generally popular program that will reduce costs and – in the worst case scenario – will simply fail to displace a meaningful portion of the private insurance market. When push finally comes to shove and there’s an actual bill that needs to pass, these folks are probably going to vote for it regardless of disagreements at the margins.
The reason why I still don’t expect a strong public option is that even if we can be reasonably sure Evan Bayh is not going to derail the single most important piece of progressive legislation since LBJ over something so trivial, we can’t be sure. And more importantly, the White House and Democratic leadership can’t be sure. They all want a public option, of course, but they simply want a bill more.
What could be very interesting is the deals that take place assuming the stronger opt-out version does actually end up in the bill. How long will the supporters fight for it? How hard? Are they willing to play chicken on this? As things drag on, are they going to keep together the votes needed to shoot down GOP amendments as they pile up and up and up?
My guess is no. At some point, the leadership is going to loosen the reins, tell the wavering members that it’s okay to kill the opt-out. And the best case scenario will be that all of the fighting on this will have shifted opinion about where the ‘center’ is on this question sufficiently that the other side will take a trigger option that isn’t totally pointless (i.e. – that has meaningful targets).
Recent twists and turns might have changed things a bit, but I’d still wager that health care reform will pass before 2010, and that whatever variation on the public option that it includes will be so watered down as to be (relatively) meaningless.
Until things change again in a few hours.