Hillarysworld

December 20, 2009, 11:22 am

No Change in Coverage Numbers, No Fight for Public Option

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

The public option had to go.

For Senate Democratic leaders struggling to round up 60 votes for their sweeping health care legislation, that was one loud message from centrist holdouts, including Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who on Friday night gave the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, the hand-shake of a lifetime.

Mr. Nelson, like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, had insisted that he could not support the public option – a government-run health insurance plan that liberals favored as a way to create competition for private insurers.

But as the dust and the snow settle, it is clearer than ever that the fight over the public option was much more about political messaging than it was about health care policy.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in its analysis of the final version of Mr. Reid’s health care bill found virtually no difference in the number of people who would gain health insurance coverage with the public option removed from the equation.

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