Senators in the Back Room Again

You see a headline like this and you wonder how they've screwed us this time:

Reid Says Deal Resolves the Impasse on the Public Option

From NYT:

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said Tuesday night that he and a group of 10 Democratic senators had reached “a broad agreement” to resolve a dispute over a proposed government-run health insurance plan, which has posed the biggest obstacle to passage of sweeping health care legislation.

It's a decent article -- has actual information about what's in the package, rather than the usual play-by-play on the kabuki.

Digby comments here:

I believe that had Obama and Reid really been committed to the public option they probably could have found a way to finesse Lieberman long before now. There is no doubt that the only reason Lieberman did this was to fuck the liberals. Hard. It's obviously become his life's purpose.

We'll know details soon. Right now it sounds like everyone is still confused, so there's no need to get too excited or angry or anything else. Rockefeller's attitude bodes well. And I saw Bernie Sanders on Maddow and he seemed quite jolly, although he reiterated his pledge to not vote for any bill that didn't have a public option. So, we'll see.

Part of this one got lost -- I'll have to come back later and reconstruct it.

OK -- I'm back.

From Brian Beutler at TPM:

If this trade-off carries the day, the opt out public option is gone.

In its place will be many of the alternatives we've been hearing about, including a Medicare expansion and a triggered, federally-based public option, the aide said.

As has been widely reported, one of the trade-offs will be to extend a version of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to consumers in the exchanges. Insurance companies will have the option of creating nationally-based non-profit insurance plans that would offered on the exchanges in every state. However, according to the aide, if insurance companies don't step up to the plate to offer such plans, that will trigger a national public option.

Beyond that, the group agreed--contingent upon CBO analysis--to a Medicare buy in.

That buy-in option would initially be made available to some uninsured people aged 55-64 in 2011, three years before the exchanges open. For the period between 2011 and 2014, when the exchanges do open, the Medicare option will not be subsidized--people will have to pay in without federal premium assistance--and so will likely be quite expensive, the aide noted. However, after the exchanges launch, the Medicare option would be offered in the exchanges, where people could pay into it with their subsidies.

So it sounds like they've picked the worst of all the options available, pretty much. I mean, a trigger? Olympia Snowe must be getting moist over that one. And can someone explain to me why these bozos think it's OK to require everyone to purchase health insurance immediately, but any subsidies for those who aren't rich -- which is most of us -- wait for a few years?

The devil's in the details. Some pertinent questions from Ezra Klein:

The details will be important here. What are the conditions for the non-profit plans? How many plans do there need to be? What does the regulation look like? When does the Medicare buy-in start? But assuming those pieces don't come in much worse than expected, the combination of national non-profits and a Medicare buy-in seems like a pretty good deal. Better by far than what Democrats looked likely to get a week ago. And more likely, by far, to seed health-care reform with scalable experiments.

What bothers me is that remark about them "not coming in much worse than expected." Doesn't build a lot of confidence in the final result.

Who knows? Maybe Jay Rockefeller's smile is justified. Maybe.