The Death of the Public Option

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It looks like both the Medicare buy-in and the public option are dead:

After a meeting among Senate Democrats today, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh said it looked like the proposed Medicare expansion would be dropped. “The general consensus was that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good and in order to get all the insurance reforms accomplished and a number of other good things in the bill,” dropping the Medicare expansion “would be necessary to get the 60 votes,” Bayh told reporters.

Earlier, two top proponents of the public option, Senators Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin, said they would be willing to give up the public option to win passage. Harkin said he’d also be willing to forgo the Medicare expansion. The senators’ statements suggested a deal might be close. Harkin, an Iowa senator and chairman of the Senate health committee, and Rockefeller of West Virginia both said it was time to focus on what needed to be done to get a bill passed.

“This bill, without public option, without Medicare buy-in, is a giant step forward toward transforming American health care,” said Harkin. “That’s reality, there is enough good stuff in that bill that we should move ahead with it.”

Apparently CNN confirms this.  So in the space of a few days we seem to have gone from more than I expected to less than I expected.  I always figured we’d at least be able to get a public option trigger included, but if this report is right we’re not even getting that.  Sic transit etc.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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