Groups Are Still Trying to Get A Public Option Vote In Reconciliation. There Is No Chance.

[mmonk]

In the parliamentary fight to take place in the Senate over reconciliation, Ryan Grim reporting for The Huffington Post in a piece titled Could The Public Option Sneak Back In? reported the following:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) met with Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin Monday and told reporters that he was confident the bill would evade the GOP tactics, but he had not finished going through the full bill.

Nothing is certain until it hits the floor. If the Senate parliamentarian upholds any one of those points and the bill is altered by so much as a deleted comma, it must then go back to the House for a final vote.

That's a scenario Democrats want to avoid and is the justification behind the leadership's decision to urge Democrats to vote against every amendment, even amendments they might otherwise support - such as a public option. "We know the Republicans are likely to offer a lot of amendments, and some of them may be appealing to Democrats, but we have to urge them to stick with the bill," Majority Whip Dick Durbin told reporters earlier in March. "We have to tell people, 'You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can't let it happen."

The vote on the public option would be close without Democrats whipping against it. In that face of that opposition, it would likely be a blowout. In December, they managed to persuade 30 Democrats to vote against a bill allowing prescription drug reimportation - even though many of them were public supporters of it.

Still activists such as those at Firedoglake are still pushing to try and get representatives that pledged a public option to keep their word through delivered petition such as http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/bennetPO">one for Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado to introduce it knowing, that by the Senate's own rules, they would be required to then vote on it. However, on The Stephanie Miller Show, Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) said that will not happen.

[msongs]

1. and NEVER was nt

[Mari333]

2. it was a done deal a year ago as a payoff to huge insurance companies

In fact, the bill that was passed by the House Sunday night was a result of a deal President Obama and the Democrats cut last year with the pharmaceutical industry.

And it was written with the help of former insurance industry lobbyists.

Or as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne put it – the Democrats are fighting for a Republican health plan.






http://www.singlepayeraction.org/blog/?p=2421

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. Unfortunately, any public option at this point would be a show pony -- a sweetener

A public option that is not only means-tested but restricted is simply a lower-tier, second-class "option" not so much for people who really need it as for people whom officials don't want to look bad slapping fines and fees on, for not having private insurance. Like handicapped access vans as a supplement to mass transit systems -- not designed to expand, designed to be paid for by increased use of the "primary system" -- regular transit riders. Just as users of mass transit are ironically in the same relationship to highway users in states where mass transit is paid for with gas tax or funded for congestion relief -- it doesn't get built unless more people, not less, end up using the adjacent road.

[mmonk]

6. Yes, a dumping ground for people the insurance companies don't want.

[budkin]

4. The PO vote will come later if at all

[Raine]

5. The fix has been in since last year, that was NEVER

going to happen. :mad:

edit: typo