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It may be difficult to read and understand the health-care bills before Congress, but the end result is clear enough: fewer choices and higher cost for my family and millions of others.

The plan, which would be for people who do not get health care through their employers, has become a proxy for a larger debate over where Mr. Obama is taking the country.

“What’s going on here is not simply health care and the public option,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, a chief of staff in the Reagan White House. “In light of the auto bailout, the bank bailout, the stimulus package, the public option fight is a surrogate for how much government is too much.”

• The five bills making their way through Congress — three in the House and two in the Senate — reflect the full range of thinking, and also how far lawmakers are from consensus.
•  The most robust public plan, favored by liberals and included in two of the House bills, would tie reimbursement rates for health care providers to those paid by Medicare…
•  The third bill contains an idea being pushed by centrist Democrats to negotiate reimbursement rates with providers….
• But centrists like Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, who teaches health policy at Vanderbilt University, call the Medicare plan unworkable. Mr. Cooper said Medicare reimburses at such low rates that few doctors would sign on for such a plan.
•  [In the Senate] the health committee has approved a negotiated-rates public option,
• while the Finance Committee voted to set aside money to encourage the creation of private insurance cooperatives.
• Now Mr. Reid must merge the two Senate bills. He has said he likes Ms. Snowe’s trigger proposal —….
• But last week a new twist on the public option took hold in the Senate. Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, proposed leaving the decision on whether to establish a public plan up to the states.

It is expected that the Senate will still move to a House passed tax bill and offer a complete substitute Amendment being the Obamacare bill being written right now somewhere in the Capitol. There is no way to know if Senator Reid will use his powers as leader to block amendments or to block the open amendment procedure to only allow leadership approved amendments to receive a vote.

going to allow us to expand the ad campaign from Roll Call and The Hill to the Washington Post, specifically targeting people in D.C. who read about health care news. A lot of people in D.C. are going to know that a lot of people outside D.C. know exactly the run of play on the public option and congressional process.

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