We will not make a decision to pursue reconciliation until we have exhausted efforts to produce a bipartisan bill," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid. "However, patience is not unlimited, and we are determined to get something done this year by any legislative means necessary."Privately, those involved in the talks now say there is a 60% chance the split-bill tactic will be used. Mr. Obama is huddling with aides next week, and Senate leaders are likely to review their options when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day. (Source: WSJ)
It ain't over 'til it's over. But then there's this:
President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority. . . .
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."
"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president's sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.
"It took on a life of its own," he said.
Oh please. Why indeed are we in this? In the interests of de-mystifying these clueless clowns who think their "savvy" grasp of Beltway conventional wisdom qualifies them as experts I quote Digby:
Look, the reformers put the public plan in place as a cost control measure and threw it at the left as a crumb. I personally couldn't care less about "keeping the insurance companies honest" because they are little more than a protection racket designed to make money off of people's misery without offering anything in return. But as a good little pragmatist, in the interest of doing "what works," I went along with this Rube Goldberg plan because it seemed to be the only way to insure that I wasn't going to be forced to give some godawful insurance company my money anymore. Without a public option, I feel like I've got a gun to my head telling me that I am forced by law to pay some CEO's obscene salary with no guarantee that I'm not going to get the shaft if I get sick. Regulation alone, subject to K Street influence and corporate whores in the congress, will not get the job done. Short of single payer, the only thing that even has a chance of working is making these parasites compete. So, on a policy level, I have halfheatertedly supported the only thing that was offered, and am now being told that's going to be bargained away too. Feh.
The foundation of reform is cost control. Without a public option there is no effective method to achieve that. It's unacceptable to see this as a bargaining chip and it's disconcerting to learn that key people in the administration have are perplexed as to why some people see it as centrally important. It is centrally important both as a pragmatic tool to control costs and as a symbolic emotional issue about which people serious about reform are not willing to compromise.