Washington Post spins healthcare bill's prospects

Today's Washington Post prints a sales pitch for liberal healthcare reform, and the public option in particular, whose "prospects . . . have gone in a few short weeks from bleak to bright." Cue cheerleaders Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery.

It's positively magical how support has grown for it:

The shift in momentum is so dramatic that many lawmakers now predict that President Obama will sign a final bill that includes some form of government-sponsored insurance for people who do not receive coverage through the workplace. Even Democrats with strong reservations about expanding government's role in the health-care system say they are reconsidering the approach in hopes of making low-cost plans broadly available.

Are they basing this on their skewed poll or just a dream they had? Or on the authority of this objective Congressman:

Clyburn said the debate is no longer whether to include a public option, but "whether or not we will get this form of a public option or that form of a public option." Since the talk of "death panels" at town-hall meetings in August, Clyburn said, the political climate has changed as voters have come to understand "that all of this foolishness was just that -- foolishness. Nobody wants to pull the plug on Grandma."

Phew!

Hey, the public option is really great, and not radical at all!

The public-option debate is frustrating some Democrats, who have come to believe that a government-run plan is neither as radical as its conservative critics have portrayed, nor as important as its liberal supporters contend. Any public plan is likely to have a relatively narrow scope, as it would be offered only to people who don't have access to coverage through an employer.

The public option would effectively be just another insurance plan offered on the open market. It would likely be administered by a private insurance provider, charging premiums and copayments like any other policy.* In an early estimate of the House bill, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that fewer than 12 million people would buy insurance through the government plan.

[. . .]

Because a government-run plan would be dedicated to holding down costs and would lack a profit motive, congressional budget analysts predict that it could reduce the cost of expanding coverage to people who don't have it by as much as $100 billion over the next decade.

There's a lot more about the courageous Sen. Harry Reid sticking his neck out to "do the right thing," as he and Speaker Pelosi scheme over an opt-out option. There's nothing about how a public option would kill off private insurance -- more foolishness, I guess -- nor is there much about this:

Health care legislation taking shape in the House carries a price tag of at least $1 trillion over a decade, significantly higher than the target President Barack Obama has set, congressional officials said Friday as they struggled to finish work on the measure for a vote early next month.

Democrats have touted an unreleased Congressional Budget Office estimate of $871 billion in recent days, a total that numerous officials acknowledge understates its true cost by $150 billion or more. That figure excludes several items designed to improve benefits for Medicare and Medicaid recipients and providers, as well as public health programs and more, they added.

The officials who disclosed the details did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

So please don't tell anyone.

The abortion issue is mentioned as "muddying the waters." It seems to me that the coming bill or bills will have just as many gigantic negatives as HR 3200 and will inspire the same "foolishness" we saw in August. What has changed?

*Update: Privately-run public option?

From PNHP (via Raw Story via Hot Air), clarification on the statement above that a public option "would likely be administered by a private insurance provider, charging premiums and copayments like any other policy":

As the preceding rather convoluted description of MACs and contracting administrators suggests, neither the HELP bill nor HR 3200 makes it easy for readers to grasp that corporations, not public employees, will create, and probably run, the “option” program. Neither bill comes right out and says, “The Secretary shall hire private-sector corporations to create and run as many health insurance companies as is necessary to make health insurance available for sale to the non-elderly in each health insurance market in America.” Nor is that fact being ballyhooed by the bills’ authors and proponents. But it’s an important feature for “option” supporters to understand because it undermines the claim “option” advocates make over and over that the “option” will look like Medicare.

[. . .]

The fact that the “option” programs in both bills will be run by privately owned corporations was hinted at by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and Richard Kirsch, the campaign director of Health Care for America Now, on September 1. As the following excerpt from a post on Talking Points Memo suggests, the Democratic leadership and HCAN have known since these bills were first drafted that the “option” programs will not be Medicare-like, but rather will be administered by one or more private-sector corporations

Read the rest. The plot thickens.

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)
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