Give Me a Public Option or Give Me Death!

So announces Harry Reid. Good-bye, Baucus bill, and good-bye, Olympia Snowe!

Oh, but there will be an “opt-out” for individual states, to which Ace of Spades says: BFD!:

Reid and the Democrats (and, eventually, the President when he gets done with his golf game) will pose as if adding the opt-out is a compromise. They will protest that they were “reasonable” and now the Republicans are just being intransigent. This is a lie.

The opt-out is worth almost nothing. It does not give states the power to opt out of the insurance mandate. It does not give states the power to opt residents out of paying for the public option and the rest of ObamaCare via taxes. The opt-out does nothing to address the problems with the so-called “competitive public option”, which does nothing to provide bonafide competition to private insurers.

In short, the Democrats are giving away nothing and they will expect to be congratulated for it.

I hope Reid can count.