October 30, 2009 05:54 PM UTC

Happy Now, Jared Polis?

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• by: Colorado Pols

So liberals are less than delighted with the revised House health reform legislation revealed yesterday–there are complaints building that too any concessions were made to so-called “Blue Dog” conservative Democrats, that the “public option” insurance entity provided for in the new bill lacks the teeth to really bring costs down as originally intended.

But the bill does seem to address, at least in part, concerns from freshman Rep. Jared Polis that the funding mechanism was ‘too hard’ on the wealthiest Americans. As the Denver Post reports:

Negotiators listened, wrote legislative language and then rewrote it. Deals were cut, then redone.

Rep. Jared Polis, a Boulder Democrat, who led an insurgency by freshmen against the bill’s surtax on wealthy individuals, had gotten several assurances that the income brackets defining how the tax would fall would be raised, but he knew for sure only after Pelosi’s news conference Thursday on the Capitol steps.

“We didn’t know until we knew,” Polis said. “I can say I wasn’t certain until this morning.”

Much of the past week – the final stretch – focused on a push to get the public option tied to Medicare reimbursement rates, according to DeGette, Polis and others.

The effort failed by a nose, ultimately killed by rural lawmakers in whose districts Medicare rates are lower than average. Instead, the government-run insurance option will be based on rates negotiated between the secretary of health and human services and doctors and hospitals in various regions, close to what was included in the more conservative Senate bill.

“In the end, we came close but we didn’t have the votes,” DeGette said, estimating vote-counters fell about 20 members short of the 218 they need to pass the bill on the floor with a more robust public option included.

Several people we’ve spoken to about this expect the new House bill to be pretty close to what we’ll see in the final package that gets sent to President Obama. It was always the case that some compromise would be necessary from the ‘progressive’ idealized version of health care reform to win passage. The question for those progressives is, is this compromise good enough to support?

As for Polis, it’s more complicated. He’s angered a lot of people by focusing on protecting the wealthiest Americans from being ‘overtaxed’ instead of passing health care reform. He repeatedly expressed his desire to “reduce the cost of the final legislation,” which has become a chief driver of the compromises that have upset liberals in the new bill. And from a simple political perspective, not to mention that of anyone who wants health reform legislation to pass, the little stunt with Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn on the House floor last week was totally unacceptable.

At the same time, what people will remember a year from now is not the daily tit-for-tat as the bill was hammered out, they’ll remember whether a bill ultimately passed and was signed into law. If a bill passes before the end of the year incorporating enough meaningful health reform (see above) to make the Democratic base happy, Polis looks much better politically–even able to take credit for some of the compromises that got a few more votes to the table. That won’t work for reform advocates who inexorably view said compromises as harmful steps backward, but for the lay public? Sure. A lot of voters, after all, will still be coming to grips with the fact that this won’t result in Grandma having “the plug” pulled on her–all Polis needs to be is on the winning half of that.

But like we’ve said consistently since Polis went off-reservation with this egotistical, ill-advised “revolt” in defense of a few percentage points from the richest Americans–if no bill passes this year, or a gutted bill deemed inadequate by the base, Polis will take a disproportionate amount of the blame. Everything he’s said disparagingly about the bill while claiming to support its overall goals–“your grandpa’s tax-and-spend Democrats,” “kill the goose that lays the ‘golden egg,'” “the worst way to pay for health reform”–will come back to haunt him if the effort fails. What Polis needs to realize is his ‘safe’ seat comes with responsibilities; lest it become not so safe.