No Preemptive Surrender on Public Option

Those of you who’ve been following the blog and/or have read my Daily Beast column on the subject know that I think we could still have a very worthwhile bill even without a public option. Thus I’m sympathetic to most of the points Steven Pearlstein makes in his column about how people should give up on the public option. That said, it would be really crazy to give up on the public option right now. It might or might not be a good idea to give up on it at some time in the future, but that time certainly isn’t now. Consider that the following things would need to happen for a health reform bill to become law:

1. Senate Finance Committee writes a bill.
2. Finance bill is reconciled with HELP bill.
3. Reconciled Senate bill passes full Senate.
4. House Rules Committee reconciles the slightly different versions of the House bill.
5. Reconciled House bill passes full House.
6. Conference Committee reconciles House and Senate bills.
7. House passes conference report.
8. Senate passes conference report.
9. President signs bill.

Right now, the most important thing is to get through steps (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5). At the moment it appears that you can’t do (4) and (5) without a public option. It also appears that you can’t do (1), (2), or (3) with a public option. And that’s all just fine since this is what step (6) on the process is there for. At step (6) the appropriate thing to do is to press for a conference report that includes a public option. If progressives win that fight, then step (7) should be easy and there’ll be a tough fight over step (8). If progressives lose that fight, which I think may well happen, then I really do think it would be time to give up on the public option. I think it would be silly for the House of Representatives to vote “no” on a basically good health reform package merely because it didn’t include a public option.

But we don’t actually face that choice at the moment. At the moment giving up the public option would be giving it up in exchange for . . . what? For reform opponents finding something new to object to? It doesn’t really make sense. The actual health care bill will be written by conference committee at some future point if and only if a “health care bill” passes the House and a different “health care bill” passes the Senate. The key thing, for now, is to make that stuff happen so we can fight about the details at a later step in the process.