Public Option WikiAn interactive guide to what's in the new Senate compromise.
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009, at 11:53 AM ETClick here for a guide to following the health care reform story online.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Dec. 8 that a 10-person working group had arrived at a tentative consensus "that includes a public option." He won't elaborate until the Congressional Budget Office calculates its cost, but details are leaking out here and there. This will likely continue throughout the day. I will therefore treat this column as a one-man Wiki, updating it as often as necessary. Fine-grained detail will be added as it becomes available. Although any errors will be flagged per Slate's usual corrections policy, faulty speculation and analysis will be rewritten or removed without the fussy cross-outs, favored by some bloggers, that assault the reader in the name of accountability. Readers are invited to e-mail informed tips and links to new information to ; I won't identify you without your explicit permission. When I'm satisfied the column is "done," I'll signal that in this first paragraph.
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StumbleUponThe components to the compromise are: 1) new national nonprofit policies regulated by the Office of Personnel Management; 2) a new national public option to be created only if health insurers fail to create these new national nonprofit policies; 3) a Medicare buy-in available to people ages 55-64; 4) an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. A Medicaid expansion was considered and rejected.
Additional details are already known about each of these. I'll begin posting them shortly.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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