According to an internal Blue Dog whip count, the public option doesn't even enter their top four concerns on the health care bill:
The Blue Dogs have been surveying their membership over the last several days; coalition co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) has been collecting the responses. She listed the four top priorities that have emerged: Keeping the cost under $900 billion, not moving at a faster pace than the Senate, getting a 20-year cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and addressing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursement rates.
So, the Huffington Post asked, the public option is not a top priority?
"Right, the group is somewhat split," she said.
Given this, it would seem that if the other Blue Dog concerns are met, there should be negotiating room to include a public option tied to Medicare rates. That is, as long as the Blue Dogs are negotiating in good faith, which they might very well not be.
Meanwhile, the Progressive Caucus has completed its whip count of members willing to vote against a health care reform that does not include a robust public option. Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva is claiming success, but not releasing numbers or names:
After conducting an internal and informal count of House liberals who are still willing to oppose health care reform without a robust public plan, Dem Rep. Raul Grivalja, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says he's still confident that he has a big bloc of House liberals on board to vote against anything that falls short.
"We are comfortable with the sustained support for the public option and, for myself and others, the original letter we signed is still our position," Grijalva said in a statement emailed over to me, in a reference to 60 House liberals who signed a recent letter pledging to oppose any bill without a public option.
A Grijalva spokesperson confirms that he reached that conclusion after multiple conversations with House liberals in the last few days.
The lack of names and numbers leads one to believe that there is negotiating room for House Progressives, too. So, right now the best bet is that some kind of deal is out there that would get enough votes to pass the House, although exactly what that deal is remains unclear.
Over the in the Senate, which will have 60 functioning Democratic votes tomorrow if and when Paul Kirk is sworn in, the leadership is focused on stopping a Republican filibuster rather than on reconciliation. This is a viable strategy, given that not a single Senate Democrat has said s/he will vote against cloture on a health care bill with a public option. Some, like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu, haven't committed to opposing a Republican filibuster, but they haven't ruled it out, either. Others, like Joe Lieberman, have said they oppose a public option, but haven't said they would vote against any health care bill with a public option.
And so, the public option remains very much alive tonight. Far from secure, but very much alive.
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