Senate Democrats are trying to reassure progressives and House members that voting for the more conservative Senate health care bill doesn’t mean things can’t be improved later. They point to major historic policy changes such as Social Security and Medicare when the bills were passed with their most watered-down provisions and later bolstered, drawing parallels between those battles and the health care fight.
The public option is the most frequently cited regret for many senators, some who continue to press for it to be included in a final package. But Democrats acknowledge that while they might not get it this go-around, they aren’t giving up. Several progressives in recent days have cited the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who said the battle for health care reform “never ends.”
“We’re not done,” Sen. Sherrod Brown told reporters, pundits and bloggers at the Progressive Media Summit yesterday.
Brown (D-OH) said the bill isn’t “good enough” for him, in part because it doesn’t contain a public option, but he supports it and urged progressives to do the same with an aim of building upon it later. “We’re going to keep trying, we’re going to continue to make improvements,” he said.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow took it a step further, telling reporters she supports both single-payer health care and a public option but she knows that’s not possible. “This is an ever changing and improving process,” she said.
Stabenow (D-MI) said looking to the improvements made to Medicare in the early 1960s “gave me hope.”
“At the time it was put in place it didn’t cover people with disabilities … didn’t cover prescription drugs,” Stabenow said. “It was a very modest framework [and] the point is, it was improved upon, as was Social Security.”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) told me during a brief interview after the summit that “sometimes you have to settle for modularity.” He said the bill that Democrats are likely to pass in the next month is a way to “get started,” and said if they can prove that measure is effective, public support will shift in favor of greater change.
Of course, telegraphing this strategy gives Republicans more ammunition to warn voters that Democrats just want a full government takeover of health care, no matter how inaccurate that claim would be. As Evan reported from the summit yesterday, Sen. Bernie Sanders said he thinks it will take a few states implementing single-payer health care for it to eventually take hold nationally.
Late last year House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) made a similar argument to the Medicare one progressives are citing now, using the Civil Rights Act as his example. “The first civil rights bill was very comprehensive,” Clyburn said. “In order for the filibuster to be broken we had to drop off the Voting Rights [Act].” He said President Lyndon Johnson insisted that “it was not going to get done if they kept voting rights in,” comments that came as talk of incremental health care reform increased.
President Obama used that same sort of pitch at a major event with his grassroots supporters last fall, reminding frustrated Democrats that the “bill you least like” would still make major changes to the system.
Late Update: This morning Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told reporters that public option supporters are going to have to “swallow hard” and give up on attaching that to the reconciliation package.
“We have to move this forward. We know the Republicans are likely to offer a lot of amendments, and some of them may be appealing to Democrats, but we have to urge them to stick with the bill,” Durbin said, Roll Call reports.
Meanwhile, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) drafted a new public option bill this week.
Later Update: Rach has more on Durbin here.
