The spin war is on to frame today’s losing public option votes in the Senate Finance Committee. And though no reformer can honestly say today’s news was good news, they’re also on perfectly safe ground saying that today’s news was expected, and that the public option is in no worse shape today than it was yesterday.What we now know for sure is that conservative Democrats’ opposition to a public option tied to Medicare runs significantly deeper than it does to a public option that uses negotiated rates. From a set that often bows to Republican attacks on big government, that’s not a big surprise, though substantively it makes a big difference.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=137543