Ezra Klein: "On its own terms, the bill is the largest social policy achievement since the Great Society. It will save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of suffering. But moving forward, it also makes future improvements and expansions easier. A lot of the hard work of health-care reform -- in particular, the money for subsidies -- will finish this year. If reformers want to come back for the public option or more subsidies in a future year, they won't be doing it atop a $900 billion price tag that's being battered by tea parties and industry and everyone else. This bill doesn't have all the good stuff it should have, but reformers can stop fighting for what good stuff it does have and concentrate more intently on what good stuff is left to achieve."
Nate Silver: "For any 'progressive' who is concerned about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America, this bill would be an absolutely monumental achievement. The more compelling critique, rather, is that the bill would fail to significantly 'bend the cost curve'. I don't dismiss that criticism at all, and certainly the insertion of a public option would have helped at the margins. But fundamentally, that is a critique that would traditionally be associated with the conservative side of the debate, as it ultimately goes to mounting deficits in the wake of expanded government entitlements."
Jonathan Cohn: "Disappointed progressives may be wondering whether their efforts were a
waste. They most decidedly were not. The campaign for the public option
pushed the entire debate to the left -- and, to use a military metaphor,
it diverted enemy fire away from the rest of the bill. If Lieberman and
his allies didn't have the public option to attack, they would have
tried to gut the subsidies, the exchanges, or some other key element.
They would have hacked away at the bill, until it left more people
uninsured and more people under-insured. The public option is the
reason that didn't happen."
