Blame the Insurance Industry
Aug 18th, 2009 by nick
More and more, I’m hearing that the public option in health care reform is dead. While I’m not giving up hope yet, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight provides some interesting insight into why that might be the case:
Why doesn’t the public option have the votes for passage? You’d think that a provision that is both fairly popular and money-saving was a good bet for passage. But the insurance industry really, really does not like the public option. We’d previously estimated that its lobbying influence has cost the public option something like nine (9) votes in the Senate.
Unlike most political commentators, Nate Silver has numbers to back up most of claims, and this one is no exception. His detailed statistical analysis of the effect of insurance industry lobbying on senators’ votes is well worth reading.
P.S. I realize I’ve neglected this blog more or less since the election. I’ll try not to do that again.