Pelosi: Health Care Reform Without Public Option Will Not Pass the House

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 1:04 PM on June 11, 2009.

It appears that progressives are holding a hard line on the public option in the House. Speaker Pelosi has now stated, on consecutive days, that there are not enough votes in the House to pass a health care reform bill without a public option:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Huffington Post Thursday that a health care overhaul that did not include a public option wouldn't make it through the House because it "wouldn't have the votes."(...)

Asked by HuffPost if she would allow a reform package without a public option out of the House, she responded: "It's not a question of allow. It wouldn't have the votes."

Good. This is exactly the sort of line progressives must draw.

Also, this almost certainly means that health care reform will be passed through the reconciliation process. There simply are not 60 votes in the Senate to pass a public option. Since there are not enough votes in the House to pass health care reform without a public option, going through reconciliation is the only conceivable path at this point.

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.