Senate Already Passed A Budget That Can Pay For A Public Option

Posted: 01 Jul 2009 11:03 PM PDT

The Congressional Budget Office has put an estimated price tag on the health care reform bill from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). The plan includes a public option, and will cost just over $600 billion over ten years:

Democrats on a key Senate Committee outlined a revised and far less costly health care plan Wednesday night that includes a government-run insurance option and an annual fee on employers who do not offer coverage to their workers.

The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The AP obtained a copy.

By contrast, an earlier, incomplete proposal carried a price tag of roughly $1 trillion and would have left millions uninsured, CBO analysts said in mid-June.

The most noteworthy part of this is that a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion is slightly less than the $634 billion President Obama set aside for health care spending in the budget:

President Barack Obama's first budget will seek $634 billion over 10 years as a down payment on health care reform, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

The Senate has already passed the budget with the health care spending intact:

The Senate easily passed a $3.55 trillion federal budget late Thursday night to kick off a two-week recess, giving President Obama most of what he wanted in his first spending plan in office.

Senators voted 55-43 for a plan that was championed by the White House and congressional Democrats as key to reviving the nation's economy and panned by Republicans as too expensive to adopt.(...)

The Senate budget closely parallels the proposal put forth by Obama, trimming it only by $12 billion in non-defense discretionary spending

Add it all up, and the Senate has already passed a budget that can pay for the public option. While a few details need to be clarified, the overall structure is now in place.

At this point, the only way that a public plan does not pass into law is if right-wing Democratic ideologues like Joe Lieberman overwhelm The Progressive Bloc(k). You can make sure that doesn't happen by using the Citizen Whip Count tool at FireDogLake.