News reports from Capitol Hill last night and today indicate that Speaker Pelosi is close to including a "robust" version of the public option in the bill that will be sent to the House floor for a vote:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has chosen to put the public option favored by the liberal wing of her party in the healthcare bill that goes to the House floor, pending agreement later Tuesday night by the full caucus, according to two House sources.

Leaders are planning to roll out the bill next week, and are hoping to vote the first week in November.

The plan, called the "robust" option or "Medicare Plus 5" in the jargon that has emerged on Capitol Hill, ties provider reimbursement rates to Medicare, adding 5 percent.

Greg Sargent also reported last night that the "robust" option that will likely be included in the final House bill has been scored by the CBO to be defecit neutral:

In another step forward for the public option, I’m told reliably by a source that House leaders have been given a new Congressional Budget Office “score” finding that the evolving House bill — when you include a robust public option — reduces the deficit and is under the President’s cost goal of $900 billion.

The CBO estimate, which is newer than the one reported over the weekend, will likely be discussed at the Dem caucus meeting tonight. This is a step forward because it could make it more palatable to Blue Dogs to support a House bill with a robust public plan, meaning one that reimburses providers at Medicare rates plus five percent.

More palatable to Blue Dogs? What about Jim Cooper? Only last week, he called the "Medicare Plus 5" plan "unworkable" in an interview with the New York Times:

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.

If the "robust" public option is included, it looks more and more like Jim Cooper, despite his recent rhetoric, will end up voting against the health care reform bill in the House.

• A diarist at Swing State Project takes a look at one a possible GOP-led gerrymandered map of Tennessee's Congressional Districts post-2010 that would keep Jim Cooper's district solid-D:

  

• John at Hispanic Nashville links to some posts recounting the opposition of the late blogger and columnist Tim Chavez and his opposition to a section of federal immigration law which lets local authorities screen for immigration violations, including this criticism of Rep. Cooper for his silence on the matter in 2008:

  Mayor Karl Dean and Congressman Jim Cooper deserve rebuke for their silence over the outrage of 287g and the torture of Mrs. Villegas, not to mention her newborn son.... Where is their sense of decency? Where are their loyalities to the progressive people who put them in office? Where are the voices of the progressive people who put them in office? Or maybe "progressive" is not what I believe it means? These three elected officials also are Democrats, or what passes for one in the South.

• Jim Cooper describes health care legislative fight as the "Super Bowl" of lobbyists:

  "It is sort of a Super Bowl of lobbying for health care reform. The lobbyists are winning so far. But the game's not over yet," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee.

  Presumably, these are not the same lobbyists to which Cooper earlier this month advocated outsourcing the entire legislative process on health care:

Wall Street firms who were bailed out by taxpayers last fall are once again reporting record profits and giving out record bonuses.

But at the time that Congress approved the $700 Billion bailout last October, what were Jim Cooper's concerns? As he expressed them Politico, it was that the bailout wasn't big enough:

Jim Cooper, Rep. (D-Tenn.):

"Is the bail-out big enough? No, this is not a joke. The Administration has consistently underestimated the problem; only three days ago they thought 500 billion was enough. The fire extinguisher must be able to handle the fire. You don't want to do this twice. How convenient for President Bush if, four months from now, President Obama has to ask for the bail-out authority that Bush should be asking for today."

How "fiscally conservative" of this Blue Dog leader.

In the months since he argued for an even larger bailout of Wall Street, Cooper's appetite for spending on anything other than bailing out Wall Street has grown decidedly weaker. He voted against President Obama's economic recovery act in February, claiming that it was too full of "pork", like funding for Nashville schools:

“I love Obama, but I’m disappointed with Congress for its business-as-usual attitude. The bill is loaded with pork. Half of it had nothing to do with stimulus. Only 5 percent has to do with the infrastructure projects that most people in the public think is in the bill. It was the largest bill in American history, by far, and one of the most wasteful,” Cooper said. “It’s likely it will only get worse when it goes to the Senate.”...

Cooper, for his part, said he could see the construction allocations creating jobs, and that he would love to “play Santa Claus” and approve a $76 million check for Metro schools. That doesn’t mean Congress should be spending borrowed money in order to do so, he said.

“[The education allocations] tempt a lot of people back home to want a federal solution to everything. If we had the money, we’d be glad to share it, but we’re borrowing this from China,” Cooper said. "I would love to be able to write a check for $76 million for Nashville schools. But do you want a federal takeover of the schools? Most federal money comes with strings attached, if not immediately then eventually.”

And even before President Obama was sworn in, Cooper was arguing for a "fiscal responsibility" summit to be included in the recovery act that would have addressed cuts in things like Social Security.

Shorter Jim Cooper: deficit spending doesn't matter, as long as Wall Street gets the money.

Rep. Cooper has apparently become the go-to Blue Dog for the New York Times for "centrist" quotes on health care. Sometimes he feeds them lines that are deceitfully self-serving ("the lobbyists are winning!"), but most of the time they end up being simply self-revealing.

Case in point: today's front-page New York Times piece on the "next big hurdle" for the health care debate, the public option. As Scarecrow notes, to characterize a robust public option as an "obstacle" causing "deep divisions" within the Democratic party is simply inaccurate:

Only a small handful of Congressional Democrats (who in another era, would have been Republicans) oppose a public plan. This near consensus reflects that 65 percent of Americans and overwhelming majorities of Democratic voters support the idea, as shown in the most recent New York Times/CBS poll.

More specifically, there is broad Democratic support in the House for a robust public option that would be tied to Medicare rates, and an even broader consensus that some public option is needed:

Over two hundred Democrats in the House are prepared to vote for a public plan tied to Medicare rates while most of the rest would accept a public plan with negotiated rates. In the Senate, there are likely over 50 votes for a public plan and a majority of Democrats, not including all of its supporters, have already sent Harry Reid a letter asking him to include a public option in the merged bill. The Times can’t recall any of this.

But guess who the New York Times names as the reasonable "centrist" who opposes a robust public plan that would provide real competition for private for-profit insurance companies?

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.

I guess that strikes down one of those "eighteen definitions" of the public option Jim Cooper had in mind.

Southern Beale ties it all together - a big ball of FAIL:

But maybe if we stopped acting like Republican-light is the direction the Democratic Party needs to go, folks like Jim Cooper wouldn’t feel the need to tack to the right, either.

Today, the health insurance industry group AHIP - America's Health Insurance Plans - is in the news for "declaring war" on health care reform by releasing the results of a study they themselves commissioned and which they claim proves that the Senate Finance Committee bill would increase health insurance premiums. As the Politico notes:

This might be the first rift unfolding in public between an inustry player and the White House and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). The health care industry has been loathe to litigate the bill in public, fearing a backlash from the White House. The pharmaceutical and hospital industries cut separate deals with the White House and Baucus to mitigate that amount of payment cuts they could face in an overhauled system....

In the report, "there are a series of conclusions they draw that are not conclusions drawn by anybody else," [an] administration official said.

Over the weekend, Jim Cooper proclaimed his sorrow that the "lobbyists were winning" the health care fight. But back in April, Cooper was more than happy to accept a campaign contribution from a lobbyist for AHIP:

CHAMPLIN, STEVEN - WASHINGTON DC 20007 - 04/24/2009 - 500.00 - THE DUBERSTEIN GROUP, INC./VP/TREA

The Duberstein Group and Steven Champlin in particular count AHIP as one of their clients, and the Duberstein Group has received $200,000 from AHIP in 2009 alone.

On Friday, October 2, 2009, Rep. Jim Cooper spoke on a panel at the 2nd annual Health Care Business Alliance conference at Vanderbilt University - a sold-out conference that was sponsored and attended by major private sector industry leaders.

In an answer to a question about whether he thinks meaningful health care reform can take place this year and overcome the intransigence of "vested interests" in the industry, Cooper clearly stated his conception of how it should work - letting the "vested interests" in the private sector write the bill, and having Congress simply "ratify" it:

"So how do we solve some of these problems? We can do it. There's ways to do that. With the business minds in this room, we could do it. I threatened to lock the breakfast group in the room until they came up with a solution. And that's really the ideal way for it to work - and then present a solution to Congress and we'll ratify it. But, where's the private sector solution?"

It isn't surprising that Cooper is comfortable outsourcing the entire legislative process on health care reform to private sector lobbyists - he has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from those same interests over the course of his career, and took the lead role in defeating President Clinton's health care reform in 1994 on their behalf.

But in a front page article in today's New York Times, Cooper is quoted prominently lamenting the state of the legislative process on health care:

"The lobbyists are winning," said Representative Jim Cooper, a conservative Tennessee Democrat who teaches health policy.

Just days earlier, he was advocating that business interests be allowed to write the entire bill, allowing Congress to simply "ratify" it.

A Nashville voter writes in to the Nashville Scene:

Cooper claims his "co-ops," an idea nearly universally derided as a cost restraining measure, are the only way to pass a bill. Even though there has been virtually zero interest in any part of Cooper's plan, he still insists it is the only way. I might be willing to forgive Cooper's naivete as a typical politician's fantasy of glory, a pitiful congressional Walter Mitty, except that Cooper has pulled this routine before. He was one of the leaders in the successful effort to derail health reform under the Clinton administration and deny coverage to millions of Americans. Fifteen years later, he is doing it again.

And while it's heartwarming to see the local party coming to Cooper's defense, keeping outside interests out of our politics, I wish they were so willing to decry the people who are truly Cooper's most steadfast supporters, namely the insurance companies and the medical industry; they have donated over a million dollars to "our" representative. Woods even has them saying, "Special interests would pour cash into his campaign and deny it to his opponent." Doesn't that make you proud we are keeping out the interlopers who want to... gasp...provide more affordable insurance to Americans? Cooper doesn't represent the people of his district, he represents the for-profit medical industry.

Will a primary opponent be able to defeat Cooper? Probably not, but neither Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman were supposed to lose either. I know it's uncouth to practice real democracy in America, and Cooper—a legacy politician gifted a seat off his father's reputation—certainly doesn't approve, but many people in the 5th District would join me in supporting a credible candidate against Cooper.

Ezra Klein answers a reader question about Jim Cooper's preferred approach to health care reform:

Nashville: My congressman, Jim Cooper, is holding out hope that HR 1321 (Wyden-Bennett) will be considered. He opposes HR 3200 but says he'd support adding a public option to Wyden-Bennett.

Three-part question: 1) Is there any real possibility that Healthy Americans Act will get serious consideration? 2) What would it take for HR 3200 to get transformed into something like Healthy Americans Act? and 3) Do you think this has any real chance of happening?

Ezra Klein: 1) No. 2) Not gonna happen. 3) No.

In recent months, Jim Cooper has been emerged as a leading proponent of health care "co-ops" as an alternative to a robust public option in the current reform legislation. He has said he thinks they would work:

"A co-op... is really used over three-quarters of the land area of America so we buy our electricity that way. It's a creature of the New Deal. It's worked really pretty well over all the country for 70 or 80 years. It's owned by the customers; it is not owned by the government. It works. It works real well."

He has also gone on at length on right-wing radio about the merits of co-ops, saying:

"It is possible to construct a public option that would work and would be broadly acceptable to Tennesseans.... One of them that is talked about today that might be OK would be the co-operative thing."

The Congressional Budget Office is now out with their score of the Baucus health care bill. Their verdict? Not so much:

The proposed co-ops had very little effect on the estimates of total enrollment in the exchanges or federal costs because, as they are described in the specifications, they seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country or to noticeably affect federal subsidy payments. As a result, CBO estimates that of the $6 billion in federal funds that would be made available, about $3 billion would be spent over the 2010–2019 period."

As Jason Rosenbaum notes regarding that last statistic:

Co-ops are so ineffective you can't even give away the start-up money. The co-op idea doesn't work.