Sen. Chuck Schumer is in the healthcare reform limelight again, and receiving pats on the back in some circles for his leadership in stepping forward and pressing for a public plan option:

One of the leading Senate Democrats in the health care reform battle said that the seating of Al Franken has given the party the purpose and direction it needs to ensure that a public option for insurance coverage remains in any bill.

“If you did a consensus within the Democratic Party, you would find the level-playing-field public option to be the answer,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “And now that we have 60 votes, it seems to me like we don’t have to turn it inside out for something we don’t like.”

Schumer’s qualifier to “public option”, though, is the very definition of emasculation. The level-playing-field public option is a public option with all the teeth taken out of it. It’s the public option that health insurance companies want to see if there has to be a public option:

I would add that the “public plan” has become a catch-all phrase for any health insurance option managed by the government. While progressives have distinguished between Kent Conrad‘s co-ops and the public plan, the former being a poor substitute for the latter (and while Kathleen Sebelius is not totally wrong that a co-op could mimic a public plan, the nomenclature will sink such a compromise, IMO), they have not distinguished between a public option that would use Medicare bargaining rates to drop premiums as much as 30%, and Chuck Schumer’s vision of a “level playing field” public option that would not use that bargaining power and would essentially become another non-profit competing for insurance, with little benefit on cost and a danger of becoming “a dumping ground for sicker and older patients.”

As I said last month, this is just scuttling real healthcare reform from within. At that time, Schumer was pitching it as a compromise to get recalcitrant Republicans on board:

Mr. Sheils (John F. Sheils, a senior vice president at Lewin) estimated that only 12 million people with private coverage would migrate to a public plan if Congress provided protections for insurers, along principles suggested by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Seeking to broker a deal that might attract Republican support, Mr. Schumer is promoting many of Mr. Nichols’s proposals (Len Nichols, the director of health policy at the New America Foundation), including that a public plan be subject to the same regulations as private plans and that it pay providers at higher levels than Medicare.

And now the same proposal stands reincarnated as the lofty target that Democrats should strive for now that they have 60 votes and don’t need to be courting Republicans. It’s a bloody miracle, isn’t it?