‘Top Line’ — Would Liberals Sink Health Care Reform?

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: If President Obama ultimately accepts a health care bill that doesn’t include the public option — as White House aides are strongly hinting — the move will be predicated on a big gamble: That liberal Democrats won’t sink reform by opposing such a measure.
That leaves backers of the public option doing everything they can to let the White House know they’re serious. On ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today, Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, said enough House members — and at least one senator, Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill. — feel strongly enough about the issue that they’ll vote to sink any bill that doesn’t include a strong public-run option to compete with private insurers.

“You can’t pass a bill through the House of Representatives that doesn’t include a public option. The votes aren’t there, and we saw Sen. Roland Burris actually draw a fairly bright line in the sand very recently saying he will not vote for a bill that doesn’t include a public option,” Burner told us. “[The president] wants the bill to pass. If he wants the bill to pass it’s going to have to include a public option. There’s no other path,” Burner added. Burner’s organization is joining with other liberal group to press Democratic leaders and the White House to include a public option in the final version of a health care bill. Compromises that have been floated — such a “trigger” that would create a public option only if promised savings don’t materialize — aren’t acceptable, Burner said. “How much worse does it have to get? We’ve got people going bankrupt. We’ve got people dying,” she said. “That doesn’t cut it from the perspective of the members of the House who have drawn the line. They have said they want a robust public option from day one.” Burner called on President Obama to lobby moderate Democratic senators on the public option — or at least get them to rule out joining Republicans in filibustering a bill that includes one. “If the White House wants a health care bill, the most straightforward way for them to get one is to apply pressure on the handful of [moderate] Democratic senators. That pressure needs to be applied to have them support — or at least not filibuster — a public option. That’s the most straightforward way for them to get the health care bill they need.” Burner, who narrowly lost House races in Washington State in 2006 and 2008, said she won’t be a candidate in 2010 — but isn’t making commitments beyond that. “I have promised my spouse I wouldn’t run in 2010,” she said. Click HERE for the full discussion with Darcy Burner. Also on today’s program, we chatted with New York Times columnist Gail Collins, the author of a new book: “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.” Collins gave her take on why it’s been so difficult for the president to turn his campaign energy into governing action. “It was so easy when the question was, ‘Do you really hate George W. Bush?’ and everybody kind of rallied around that,” Collins said. “When the question is, ‘Which of the many health care plans would you like, and how much money do you think should go into the paying off people to get new policies, and what about the public option, or should there be a trigger option?’ That stuff is hard to imagine riotous crowds marching to the barricades for. It gets very complicated. We always knew that was going to be a weirder and harder thing to do.” Watch the interview with Gail Collins HERE.