This sounds promising for the country but not so much for us

Healthcare reform is finally creaking forward in the Senate. The CBO score on the Baucus bill should pretty much guarantee that the thing is going to finally get out of the finance committee.

Senator Schumer has been leading the charge to rally Democratic colleagues to support sort of public option once the Baucus bill is married to the one that emerged from the HELP committee.

On that front, it appears that a compromise is in the works that seems like it could win the support of blue dog Senators without alienating progressive votes.

The bill would include a national public option healthcare plan, which I think, is a major victory.

But it would also allow individual states to opt out, to prohibit its citizens from choosing the public option.

Now for most of the country, this is a great deal.

For people in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Deep South this might not be so great.

Though I think the politics of denying Louisiana residents the opportunity to participate in a national program like the public option is quite a bit more difficult than halting the creation of the program in the first place, I don't think there will be a shortage of ultraconservative politicos willing to roll the dice.

It also exposes what I consider to be the central challenge to progressive politics in the United States. To what extent can the Democratic Party and the loose progressive coalition that brought it back to power continue to throw overboard minority, poor, and working class families of the South and other ultraconservative areas when it comes to enacting policies that poor and working class families in conservative districts and states need more than anybody else?

If families and individuals from Louisiana, perhaps the state with the absolute worst healthcare outcomes of all, can't take a crack at a national public option program because of ridiculous GOP intransigence and Democratic cowardice, it would be tragic.

Still, I think the right thing to do is to swallow hard, embrace this sort of compromise for the good of the country, and take our chances fighting any state politicians that want to deny Louisiana residents the right to choose the public option.

What say you?