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February 20, 2010 04:48 AM UTC

Bennet Pressures Reid to Support Reconciliation For Public Option

  • 28 Comments
  • by: RedGreen

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid signaled today he will support adding a public option to the health care bill using reconciliation if Democrats agree to use the procedure to pass changes to the bill.

A big element pressuring Reid to take this position? The letter written by Sen. Michael Bennet asking him to.

Of course, there are a number of conditions that have to be met before this plan moves ahead — the White House has to sign on, the Senate parliamentarian has to sign off, and House Dems have to agree — but this is a remarkable step toward passing the kind of health care reform polls say voters support.

Reid’s statement below.

From Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog at the Washington Post:

With more and more Senators signing on to the letter urging Reid to hold an up or down vote on the public option under reconciliation rules, Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau sends over a statement signaling Reid’s qualified support for the move:

Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition. That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal.

If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.

If Congress passes a public option using reconciliation, Michael Bennet will be:

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28 thoughts on “Bennet Pressures Reid to Support Reconciliation For Public Option”

  4. Is if this passes – the health insurance companies used their clout to kill a bill that was quite good for them, and will end up with not only the bill, but also the public option which was the #1 thing they wanted dead.

  6. what an irony this would be if the public option passes now.

    Democrats need to accomplish something significant and it should be this.  Passing health care for tens of millions of people would be a major accomplishment; the current winds suggest it would hurt Democrats, but I think they will have earned a great deal of credit.

    If reconciliation is good enough for Bush tax cuts, Democrats shouldn’t be bashful about using it for this purpose.

  7. http://voices.washingtonpost.c…

    On the surface, then, you have almost 20 senators supporting the idea, the Senate majority leader giving it his backing and the White House saying they’ll follow the Senate’s lead. Green pastures ahead, right?

    Well, not as far as I can tell. I’ve spoken to a lot of offices about this now, and all of them are ambivalent privately, even if they’re supportive publicly. No one feels able to say no to this letter, but none of them seem interested in reopening the wars over the public option. That’s why the White House kicked this at Reid and Reid tossed it back at the White House. If the public option is a done deal, everyone will sign on the dotted line. But between here and there is a lot of work that no one seems committed to doing, and that many fear will undermine the work being done on the rest of the bill.

    Doesn’t sound like anyone on the Hill is actually interested in making this a reality. It’s optics for the base and the public.

    More from Ezra,

    No one I’ve spoken to — even when they support the public option — thinks that its reemergence is good news for health-care reform. It won’t be present in the package that the White House will unveil Monday. Everyone seems to be hoping this bubble will be short-lived.

    2. what the republicans claim… That the Public Option will kill their chances at keeping majority power. when just the opposite is true. (no surprise there.)

      adding the public option actually energizes those who voted for Democrats to vote for Democrats again.

      It also places one more REAL threat to Insurance Companies. Granted Insurance companies will really just transfer the sickest to the Public option like they currently do in placing the sickest into medicaid and medicare.

      But also those 20 somethings required to buy Insurance of some sort will go with the least expensive. if that is Insurance then Insurance wins. however most likely the choice for those 20somethings will be the Public Option.

    3. As far as the public can tell, the Democrats have been totally cowed and are running for the hills. After all, all they have is a 59-41 majority in the Senate: how can we realistically expect them to ACCOMPLISH anything?

      Good for Sen. Bennet for pushing this issue. If the Democrats pass a public option, I’ll start believing my vote meant something. Otherwise, those loony tea party types are being handed the playing field.

  8. My expertise is not in health care, but from what I understand one of the deficiencies of the health care bill that squeaked through was the lack of cost containment. This week we’ve heard horror stories of huge premium hikes (Anthem in CA of 37%, postponed under public pressure).

    With obscene premium hikes on the horizon and the US already paying 16% of GNP on health care (projected to rise to 22% of GDP by 2016) while other industrialized countries are paying in the 10% to 12% range with national healthcare, cost containment must be a priority.

    If the public option induces enough competition to get a handle on this, then it must be included in the bill.  

    1. In other countries, doctors aren’t multi-millionaires and neither are insurance executives. They don’t cowtow to big pharma.

      Greed by the medical industrial complex is the problem.

      But nobody has the guts to take on the greedy docs.

      2. No doctors I know (self included) are multi-millionaires.  Nor are any siginificant percentage of the ones I don’t know.

        But go ahead with your “doctors should be poor” meme if you want smart motivated people to avoid the profession.

        1. Most doctors are telling students considering medicine to not do it – because they take on 200K in debt to get through med school and if some of the proposed changes go through, that will never be paid off.

          1. And I’ll give you hundreds more who say th eopposite.

            We can all agree that 200K of student loan debt is likely to skew the perceptions of students and young grads.

            But there is no data to back up your claim. Anecdotes galore- no data.

            1. New England Journal of Medicine

              January 1, 2004  



              Dissatisfaction with Medical Practice

              In a telephone survey of 2000 physicians that was conducted in 1995, 40 percent of the doctors said they would not recommend the profession of medicine to a qualified college student.

              http://content.nejm.org/cgi/co…

              The concern of many is that these combined financial and lifestyle factors, aside from creating dissatisfaction amongst practicing physicians and potentially speeding retirement or career changes, will also decrease the interest level of potential medical students, particularly high quality applicants. Despite the argument that a decreased supply fuels demand in a free market, a particularly unappealing job may not respond as expected to increased demand unless compensation increases significantly. Those who are attracted to an unappealing, but high paying job may not be the applicants who will make the most compassionate physicians. News of the shortage thus far has indeed increased interest in careers in medicine. Applications to medical schools have been on the rise, and in 2007, the entering class to U.S. medical schools had the highest GPA and MCAT scores on record. Will these trends continue? Conclusions remain speculative at this point.

              http://www.studentdoctor.net/2…

              Now was gertie trying to piss me off intentionally?

  9. It could be that the threat of the public option in the reconciliation bill is a ruse to scare a few Repubs into buying into some compromise that doesn’t contain a public option.  If that’s all it is (and we will know very soon), and the Dems are just using it as a trick and have no real intention of getting a final bill with a public option in it, they could be setting themselves up for a major backlash from progressives.  I sure hope this push is for real, but we’ve been suckered before, particularly from the White House.

    1. This would be the back up plan if during the Feb. 25 health care session, Republicans decide to pick a fight. The piece meal health care strategy is still at the forefront of possibilities in health reform.

      Especially for Bennet who is all but leading the “reconciliation” push. If reconciliation were to be leveraged and Bennet is tagged with the fact that he headed up the effort, it would be an understatement to say that he’s going to have an extremely difficult general election. Independents will not be happy…

      1. to God it is not, just to get negotiations from Republicans – without the public option, then Bennet will have more to worry about among the primary voters.

        Perhaps Obama is finally taking a page from our previous President who threatened reconciliation first (with his infamous Bush tax cuts of 2001) and the Dems started negotiations to get some of their demands met prior to that reconciliation. The end result was that the tax cuts passed with 12 democrats signing on the bill, and Bush ended up not needing the reconciliation.

        http://www.tnr.com/article/pol…

        But, if Obama and the dem leadership never had any intentions of passing the Public Option, then this letter to Reid will just be a dog and pony show for candidates who are in primaries or polling poorly with the base.

        This just in, another primary challenged Democrat just signed on.

        Arlen Specter http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

        keep your fingers crossed  that this momentum will increase

  10. I didn’t think the letter Polis wrote, advocating a public option via reconciliation, would actually go anywhere, but it arguably got Bennet to circulate the same sort of thing. And if a public option actually ends up in the final bill, Bennet gets the credit for it. A lot of people thought it was dead, and he’s brought it back into the debate.

    Premature to give out awards, but if it works, it would make up for anything either of them have done that I disliked.

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