A few weeks ago, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee submitted an unfinished version of their bill for scoring by the Congressional Budget Office.  The results were bad: a cost of $1 trillion with coverage for only one-third of the uninsured.  People freaked out.  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) declared the “death. . . [of] a government run health care plan.”  But somewhere along the way, these people (both Republican and Democrat) seemed to forget that this incomplete bill had excised language about the public plan or an employer mandate.  The bill that had been scored had no mention of Graham’s government health care plan.

But since then, the missing language has been added, detailing both the public plan (named the “Community Health Insurance Plan”) and an employer mandate.  CBO scores came back yesterday, and they’re suprising:

The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Chew on that, naysayers.

And while Jonathan Cohn, of The New Republic, reminds us that the total cost of health care reforms will be $1 trillion (once reforms to Medicare not under the jurisdiction of the HELP committee are added in), a trillion happens to be the magic target Obama and Congress are aiming for.  The ways to pay for this have been worked out and are already on the table.

Wonk Room has the details of the new plan:

- Community Health Insurance Option: Will have to compete on a level playing field with private providers and offer competitive rates and premiums. Presumably, the plan will be able to use its administrative efficiency and its market power (assuming it is able to attract a significant number of applicants and providers) to lower premiums.

- Employer mandate: Large employers would have to provide coverage to their workers or pay $750 per full-time employee, $375 for each part-time employee. Businesses with less than 25 employees will receive a tax credit, on a sliding scale, based on the number of workers. Ezra Klein points out, “the CBO estimates that “a mere 150,000 will lose their coverage. That’s nothing. And it means that a lot more Americans end up insured and the government spends a lot less in subsidies.”

With savings that good, it’s no wonder the AMA has decided to endorse the public plan.