NOTE FROM JOHN: It always inspires confidence when we spend how many decades studying this issue, how many months working on it, and then in the last 48 hours, they come up with an entirely new plan because none of our leaders was willing to actually fight for the real plan.
UPDATE: The New York Times has updated the title and first paragraph of its report:
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said on Tuesday night that he had reached “a broad agreement” among a group of 10 Democrats who have been working to resolve the dispute over a proposed government-run insurance plan that has posed perhaps the biggest obstacle to major health care legislation.We'll have to wait for to officially find out that the public option has been altered into something that isn't even close to being a public option. Details are beginning to leak out:
But Democratic aides said that the group had tentatively agreed on a proposal that would replace a government-run health care plan with a menu of new national, privately-run insurance plans modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers more than eight million federal workers, including members of Congress, and their dependents.Got that? Senators don't live in the real world. It's hard to imagine a group of Senators will, under pressure, come up with something that actually works.
A government-run plan would be retained as a fall-back option, the aides said, and would be triggered only if the new proposal failed to meet targets for providing affordable insurance coverage to a specified number of people.
The agreement would also allow Americans between age 55 and 64 to buy coverage through Medicare, beginning in 2011.
And, expect a debate about what the defintion of "public option" is.
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Despite broad support for the public option among the public, Democratic Senators aren't going to have the provision in their bill according to The New York Times:
The Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said Senate leaders “have a broad agreement” on dropping a government-run plan from the health care bill, and that the Congressional Budget Office would review the implications of such a move on the budget.Not a surprise, but still somewhat stunning just how much control the insurance industry has over Congressional Democrats. Indeed, this is a "WIN" for the insurers. We lose.
“I told head of C.B.O. we would send him something he would have to score,” Mr. Reid said. He added that he had asked Senators Charles E. Schumer and Mark Pryor to work together with a group of liberals and moderates on making sure the health care bill has a vehicle to expand coverage to achieve the aims of the so-called public option.
We needed leadership here. We didn't get any.
