Special Interest Money Means Longer Odds for Public Option

[t0dd]

Some insightful commentary and an interesting analysis on the prospects of the public option...

Source: FiveThirtyEight -- Nate Silver
More here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/special-interest-money-means-longer.html

As I lamented yesterday, health care is one of those areas where both popular opinion and sound public policy seem to take a backseat to protecting those stakeholders who benefit from the status quo. But can we actually see -- statistically -- the impact of lobbying by the insurance industry on the prospects for health care reform? I believe that the answer is yes.



Some 37 senators are listed by Howard Dean's website as supporting the public option so far: 36 Democrats plus Olympia Snowe. To Dean's list I add Arlen Specter as a 'yes' vote, based on a recent public statement.

I decided to build a model to explain and predict whether a particular senator supports the public option. The variables in the model are as follows:

-- The senator's ideology, as measured by his DW-NOMINATE score;
-- Per capita health care spending in the senator's home state;
-- Lobbying contributions received by the senator from health insurance PACs since 2004.

Below the jump, I explain each of these in a bit more detail.

...



If the Democrats are operating in a 50-vote environment on health care (which is debatable) then they need to find 12 additional votes for the public option. The easiest pickup, not listed here, is Al Franken, who will almost certainly support the public option and who will probably be seated by the time the Senate votes on health care. The next 11 easiest converts are, in order, Senators Begich, Byrd, Cantwell, Dorgan, Tester, Wyden, (Bill) Nelson, Hagan, Lieberman, (Mark) Udall, and Carper. One also imagines that if a bill with a public option wins the race to the floor, Senator Reid will at some point have grit his teeth and signed off on it.

The other senators on the bottom half of this list are liable to be tough gets. Keep in mind, however, that these probabilities reflect the chances of a senator having come out for the public option already and not necessarily the probability that he will do so in the future. There are a couple of potential game-changers that could shift the momentum on the issue, one of which would be successful intervention by the President and the other of which would be a favorable CBO score on the House's version of the health care bill, which does include a public option.

...

To be clear, not all of the opposition to the public option is the result of special interest money. Most Republicans probably oppose it on general principle, and there are a couple of Democrats, like Maria Cantwell of Washington, who have yet to come around to it even though they've taken almost nothing (in Cantwell's case, literally nothing) from the insurance industry. But the money is why, even with 59-60 votes in the Senate and a President with high approval ratings, Democrats are facing an uphill battle on the issue.

[msongs]

1. lack of leadership at the top plus corporate bribes...err campaign contributions nt

[Lasher]

2. Good scoop t0dd, thanks for this!

It looks like our only hope for any kind of a public option is reconciliation, where we would be operating in a 50-vote environment in the Senate. So I wish they would just stop wasting time playing games with the GOP because all except Snowe will vote nay anyway.