Public Option Wiki: Slate Magazine's Interactive Guide To What's Happening

enate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Dec. 8 that a 10-person working group had arrived at a tentative consensus "that includes a public option." He won't elaborate until the Congressional Budget Office calculates its cost, but details are leaking out here and there. This will likely continue until the proposal is released formally. I will therefore treat this column as a one-man Wiki, updating it as often as necessary. Fine-grained detail will be added as it becomes available. Although any errors will be flagged per Slate's usual corrections policy, faulty speculation and analysis will be rewritten or removed without the fussy cross-outs, favored by some bloggers, that assault the reader in the name of accountability. Readers are invited to e-mail informed tips and links to new information to [email protected]; I won't identify you without your explicit permission. When I'm satisfied the column is "done," I'll signal that in this first paragraph.

The components to the compromise are: 1) two new national nonprofit policies regulated by the Office of Personnel Management; 2) a new national public option to be created only if health insurers fail to create these new national nonprofit policies; 3) a Medicare buy-in available to people ages 55-64; 4) an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program; 5) a new regulatory requirement that insurers spend 90 percent of what they collect in premiums on health care.

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