It was a roller coaster week for proponents of the public option. While the Senate Finance Committee rejected two proposed public option amendments,  four of the five health bills produced by congressional committees include a public option.  The next stage is to put those bills together in a process called conference, that results in a final piece of legislation that the House and the Senate will vote on.

Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Jennifer Nix: Listen here. Nix is a journalist and the publisher of Guernica Magazine. She published an essay in Salon this week about her personal and political history with single-payer health care titled “I Love My Socialist Kidney.”

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Yesterday, the powerful Senate Finance Committee met to debate two amendments that would have inserted a public option into the committee’s health reform bill. Both amendments were defeated as key Democrats sided with Republicans and the insurance companies. David Corn of Mother Jones diagnoses what ails Senate Democrats. It’s split personality disorder: “They are the best friends of the health insurance industry. They are fiercest foes of the health insurance industry.”

The Senate Finance Committee is slogging through literally hundreds of proposed amendments to the Baucus health care reform bill. The bill still doesn't have a public option, but there's a good chance that insurance subsidies will be revised upwards, as Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly reports.

Last Sunday, President Obama made his pitch for health reform on five national TV talk shows. John Nichols of the Nation criticizes Obama for his uninspired and frankly unappealing depiction of the public option:

The public option remains in limbo. The Senate Finance Committee is fine-tuning the bill it unveiled last week, which does not include a public option. However, Brian Beutler of TPM reports that Democrats have already submitted three separate amendments that might add a public option.

While the Senate Finance Committee tinkers with the Baucus Bill, First Lady Michelle Obama is taking center stage in the health care reform debate. Obama's director of communications announced last week that the FLOTUS would be focusing on the health care needs of women and children. Mindful of the conservative backlash against Hillary Clinton's crusade for health care reform, Mrs. Obama is expected to steer clear of policy issues, according to Salon's Judy Berman.

Last Saturday, veteran right wing watcher Adele Stan of AlterNet covered the Tax Payers’ March on Washington (aka the 912 March or the DC Tea Party). About 70,000 conservative protesters converged on Washington to air their grievances, including opposition to President Obama’s health care reform agenda.

Opponents of health care reform are trying to pit the insured against everyone else. Conservative Republicans like Rep. Mike Pence warn that if we get a public option, millions of Americans will lose their private coverage because so many employers will stop offering private insurance. What Pence doesn't say is that right now, employers can stop providing insurance at any time and their workers will have nothing to fall back on. As costs rise, fewer and fewer employers are providing any health insurance at all. Most insured people have no idea how fragile their coverage is under the status quo.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), perhaps the only moderate Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, predicted that the committee’s forthcoming bill will not include a public option with a trigger. (Note that even if the Finance Committee’s bill doesn’t include a public option, one could still be added later in the legislative process, with or without a trigger.)

Still, the lack of a trigger in the Senate bill would be strange, says Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, because the trigger was Snowe’s idea.

Approximately 70,000 right-wing protesters converged on Washington, D.C. over the weekend to protest government in general, especially president Obama’s health care reform package. The signs they carried offered a glimpse of the unrestrained id of the American right.

Some carried placards that read “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy.”