The Public Option In Tonight’s Speech

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Tonight, President Barack Obama will once again declare his preference for the so-called public insurance option, a cause célèbre for Congressional liberals and a deal breaker for many Senate moderates. But that’s about as far as the president will go. He won’t demand a public option. He won’t threaten a veto if he doesn’t get one.

In fact, White House aides spent the afternoon Wednesday trying to downplay the importance of the public option to the overall health reform effort. “The public choice is a means to an end,” said one senior adviser previewing tonight’s speech by Obama. “It’s not an end in and of itself. And so he will make that clear.”

The adviser continued: “This is not a national debate about whether we have a public option for the tens of millions who are uninsured. It’s about how we bring security and stability to hundreds of millions of Americans, most of whom won’t be effected one way or another because they won’t be participating in this marketplace, the insurance exchange.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that a full-blown public option is unlikely to emerge from the Senate, and that there are several compromise possibilities on the table. These include so-called “triggers” that would condition the creation of a new public insurance plan on the insurance industry failing to reach certain, as yet undefined, benchmarks. Yesterday, Democratic House Whip Jim Clyburn, of South Carolina, a longtime supporter of the public plan, signaled a willingness forge a “trigger” compromise.

His exact quote on the matter should be bronzed, and put on the wall of a museum honoring the coded language of legislative compromise: “I do believe we can have a health care reform bill that includes a public option that is acceptable to people who don’t want a public option,” he said on MSNBC.