Progressive Breakfast: Hope For The Public Option

Despite Sen. Max Baucus's best efforts to pronounce it dead, the public option keeps refusing to die in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told constituents late yesterday that "we are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president's desk," reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal [1].

"I believe the public option is so vitally important to create a level playing field and prevent the insurance companies from taking advantage of us," he said.

It's the latest sign that, as Jon Walker writes on FireDogLake, "progressives have successfully entrenched the demand for a public option." Walker specifically cites the number of public option compromises floating around the Senate, including the idea—reported by Politico [2]—from SEIU chief Andy Stern that states should be allowed to opt out of a public option. (Mcjoan at Daily Kos critiques [3] some of the not-so public-option variations.)

Chris Bowers warns progressives to not get too excited [4].

...Remember that Harry Reid has previously described [5] his favorite public option in a way that sounds awfully like a co-op.

Here at Open Left, we are not going to take this for granted. Today, we joined with CREDO Action on a petition [6] to President Obama demanding that the public option be included the bill sent to the Senate floor. Remarkably, we are already well over 37,000 signatures today.

There is also Reid's fuzzy language captured by Politico [7]:

"Remember, a public option is a relative term," Reid said. "There's a public option, there's a public option, and there's a public option. And we're going to look at each of them."

Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee finished work [8] on its bill after 2 a.m. Friday morning. The Hill summarizes: [9]

The bill would establish state and regional health insurance exchanges for individuals and small-business employees. People with incomes from 133 percent of the federal poverty level and 300 percent of poverty would receive tax credits to help pay for insurance and people below 133 percent would receive Medicaid benefits. The bill would require a total of about $900 billion in new federal spending that would be offset with Medicare and Medicaid spending cuts and new tax revenue.

Snowe and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) teamed up to offer an amendment, adopted with Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) as the lone dissenter, to relax the financial penalties in the bill for people who do not abide by the individual mandate to obtain health coverage.

One person to watch next week when the committee is expected to vote on its bill is West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller. Despite his vow to not vote for a committee bill that does not include a public option, he did win a number of concessions that could earn his vote, including exemptions on the excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" health care plans for older workers and those in high-risk jobs.

Other provisions, per the Associated Press [10]:

• A new commission designed to wring savings from Medicare to recommend cuts in federal subsidies paid to low-income seniors who have prescription drug coverage under the program.
• Exemptions for millions of people from a requirement to purchase insurance that is currently in the bill and reduce the penalties on millions more who defy the mandate.
• Permission for states to negotiate for coverage for individuals and families with incomes slightly higher than the cutoff for the Medicaid programs that provides health care for the poor.

Side dishes

The latest Obama administration official to come into the crosshairs of the right is Kevin Jennings, the openly gay man heading  the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Fox News said that he has "promoted homosexuality" in schools and did not report to police an incident in which an "underage student"—Keith Olbermann said on the "Worst Persons" segment of his program Thursday that the student was actually 16 and thus at the legal age of consent—had sex with an older man. Think Progress [11] has the lowdown on this smear, and Emily Douglas tells a personal story [12] about Jennings at The Nation.

Fans of Glenn Beck conveniently ignore, or perhaps are unaware, of the racist beliefs of Beck's idol, W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen's writings about slavery, and his conclusion that "the slave owners were the worst victims of the system," have been excavated [13] by Pam Spaulding on Pandagon.

Right-wing Sen. Jim DeMint is planning to head to Honduras today [14], in defiance of U.S. policy, to back the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Manuel Zelaya. The AP reports [15] that Republicans Aaron Schock and Peter Roskam of Illinois, and Doug Lamborn of Colorado are heading there with him. Steve Clemons makes what's happening plain: [16] "DeMint is acting on behalf of, in cahoots with, and against the foreign policy of the United States of America in encouraging post-coup Honduran government officials defy the United States. He is encouraging a political leadership which has no legitimacy and which not recognized by other democracies in the region -- while the ousted President makes cell phone UN General Assembly statements from a couch-bed in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa." On MSNBC Thursday night, Rachel Maddow [17] asked if the appropriate word for this "begins with T and rhymes with 'reason'."