Sen. Joe Liberman (I-CT) told reporters this afternoon that as long as “there are no other attempts” to bring the public option or the Medicare buy-in back into the health care bill, “I’m getting towards that position where I can say what I wanted to say all along, that I’m ready to vote for health care reform.” But as Lieberman was getting in, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) got out. “I’m not on the bill,” said Nelson, who spoke with Obama earlier Tuesday. “I have spoken with the president and he knows they are not wrapped up today. I think everybody understands they are not wrapped up today and that impression will not be given.”

In trying to discern some of Nelson’s reasons for potentially opposing the measure, my colleague and DC Progressive blogger Emma Sandoe put together this very useful table of amendments that have gone to a vote on the senate floor. Nelson has voted with the Republicans 9 different times:

- Co-sponsored a failed measure to deny women who receive subsidies the right to purchase abortion coverage.

- Voted to send the bill back to the Senate Finance Committee to remove the Medicare and Medicare Advantage adjustments.

- Voted to eliminate the CLASS Act.

In fact, the only time Nelson voted with the Democrats was on an Ensign amendment that would have limited the contingency pay for plaintiff attorneys representing victims in malpractice cases.

Later this evening, the Senate will vote on two different drug re-importation amendments and two amendments concerning the tax provisions in the Senate bill. Nelson is expected to vote for Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-ID) motion to commit the bill back to the Senate Finance Committee and remove tax increase for Americans earning under $250,000. Nelson has previously supported drug reimportation.

Matt Yglesias points out that the health care deal in the Senate is far from signed sealed and delivered. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a key Senate moderate whose vote Reid is actively courting, left yesterday’s session early, “telling reporters he remained undecided.” Nelson has serious doubts about the bill’s abortion provisions and the long-term care insurance program known as the CLASS Act. It’s also unlikely that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — who has also opposed the CLASS Act — gave Reid a firm commitment to voting for cloture on the bill.

Since Republicans seem “united” against voting for health care reform, Reid will have to address the lingering concerns of his Democratic caucus if he hopes to pass a bill before Christmas, a goal that would require him to file cloture no later than Thursday.

Below are some of the the remaining ‘points of tension’ within the Democratic caucus:

- ABORTION: Democrats and two Republicans tabled Nelson’s Stupak-like abortion amendment. In an effort to please the Senator, Reid suggested that he would be open to strengthening the existing abortion provisions. But the Senators have yet to agree on a compromise that would satisfy both parties.

- CLASS ACT: Nelson and Lieberman view the CLASS ACT as an unfunded liability that could cost the government money over the long term. Both senators are also being pressured by the long-term-care insurance lobby to oppose the legislation. Ditching the long-term care insurance provision could prove difficult however, since the program’s revenues account for more than half of the Senate bills’ deficit reduction in the first 10 years.

- MEDICARE CUTS: Nelson voted several times to strip the Medicare cuts out of the Senate bill. It’s unclear how serious Nelson is about these Medicare changes, since his votes may have been orchestrated to send a message to Democrats.

- COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH: While Nelson hasn’t spoken out about comparative effectiveness research during this debate, in February he teamed up with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to remove CER funding from the stimulus legislation

- OPM TRIGGER: Press reports have indicated that the public option compromise would trigger a public option in the event that non profits did not join the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) network of nonprofits. Lieberman has opposed any kind of trigger and it’s unclear if this provision is still part of the compromise.

A rumor from the RPM report suggests that the Senate will vote on the bill on the morning of December 23 and begin a two-week conference on December 26th. The House and Senate could vote on the conference report in mid to late January.

Last night, when the Democrats gave in to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) demands and dropped the Medicare buy-in proposal, they also abandoned any hope of pursing Plan C (or T) and incorporating a triggered public option into the Senate bill.

After Lieberman announced his opposition to the Medicare buy-in on Sunday, some progressives began quietly nudging Reid to ditch Lieberman (who also opposes the trigger proposal) and save the public option by collaborating with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the only Senate Republican to vote for health care reform and a possible 60th vote. Snowe, after all, remained open to supporting a trigger proposal and winning her support could have tainted the effort with bipartisanship. But courting Snowe would have undermined the Democrats’ self-imposed holiday deadline, delaying a vote on health care reform until the new year with no certain prospect of securing anything genuinely worthwhile and no guarantee that other issues or senators wouldn’t derail reform. “It isn’t enough to say let’s get it done and not worry about the specifics that are in the legislation,” Snowe has said. “The more they try to, you know, sort of drive this process in an unrealistic time frame, you know, the more reluctant I become. … I don’t think we should be concerned by this artificial timetable. There’s always January.”

Snowe’s rhetoric didn’t reassure nervous Democrats or the White House, which remained focused on scoring a major legislative and political victory before the State of the Union and turning the corner to focus on jobs and the economy in the new year. Health care reform had hijacked the agenda, and as popular support for the Senate bill declined, Democrats believed it was better to pass something quickly than run the risk of not passing anything at all.

From a policy stand point, the White House may be right. The reality is, a robust Medicare-like public plan that uses the Medicare infrastructure to achieve administrative efficiencies and delivery system reforms is now a distant memory. Snowe described the plan as plans. Up to 50 different independent semi-private/public state-based non profit plans that would have lacked the market power or leverage to lower prices or change the way care is delivered. Had they been triggered — assuming the trigger was designed correctly — the plans would have been subject to today’s controversies. Opponents would have claimed that “factors other than health plans’ inability to manage spending caused the lack of affordability”; in the 21 states where conservatives are now leading campaigns to exempt the state from health care reform, the triggered plan would have been dead on arrival.

Lieberman may be gloating today, but given the politics of the public plan, it’s unclear that Democrats would have been better off if he wasn’t.