Fucking Lieberman and why we should pass the bill anyway

Recap:

Joe Lieberman didn't like the public option - an exchange like Travelocity where private insurance would have to compete with a government-run health plan. The public option would have forced competition on a monopolistic system and by everyone's guess, it would have meant lower end rates for the consumer.

But Joe threatened to filibuster the bill and since he's number 60, he got his way. Public option dead.

The next plan was a Medicare buy-in for those between 55 and 65. It would have given millions of people a lower-cost option to get good insurance. However Joe's corporate masters in Hartford didn't like it, so he again threatened to filibuster.

And Rahm Emmanuel and the White House caved and the Medicare buy-in is no more.

Which is where the first part of the title comes from. Lieberman even admits he came to oppose the Medicare buy-in - which he supported 3 months ago - because liberals and progressives liked it so much.

I was with Howard Dean in his "kill the bill" sentiments. At first.

However, notice the relative quiet from the GOP lately. They're letting Democrats kill each other in a circular firing squad. They're thinking "we don't need to touch this bill, Lieberman and the Dems will do it for us." So killing the bill plays into their hands.

Matt Yglesias notes the real reason not to oppose this bill: because human lives are at stake. Lieberman might not care but:

Lieberman has unlimited control over what happens, and no incentive to compromise, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he’s being uncompromising. Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

As Nate Silver writes, progressives would be crazy to oppose this bill. Is it flawed? Yes. has the Senate sold us down the river? Yes. But this bill will save families thousands of dollars on their health care expenses.


And as Bob Cesca observes, there is an alternate path to the end goal.

Tim F. at Balloon Juice has an interesting solution:

I say pass the Liebermanized bill and let the President sign it. Then use reconciliation to get the rest.

As he explains, all of the insurance regulations, which can't be passed via reconciliation, would remain in the current bill, and the public option, Medicare buy-ins, etc, would be passed with reconciliation.

Of course this begs the question: Would Lieberman filibuster the Senate bill anyway if he caught wind of the public option and Medicare buy-in being passed in a separate reconciliation bill? He might. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Adding... Ezra Klein wrote about the same idea:

A lot of e-mailers have asked whether Congress could pass health care now and then come back in a year and pass the public option, or Medicare buy-in, through reconciliation. The answer is yes, they absolutely can. They'd need to plan for it in the budget, as reconciliation instructions have to be passed at the beginning of the year. But there's nothing stopping them from doing that.
The question, in fact, is not "can they," but "will they?" And that depends, I guess, on a couple of things. First, the amount of sustained attention activists give to the issue. Second, how the issue plays in the 2010 midterms.