Will a health care bill pass with a public option?

[anvi]

Well, I don't accept the premise of the question, namely that if a public option doesn't pass this fall, it will never pass. 

That being said, I think it's hard to see how a bill with a public option will pass this fall.  The current list of Senate Democrats and Independents who are weak on or against a public option now (copied from another recent thread) stands at:

Bayh
Conrad
Ben Nelson
Pryor
Landrieu
Baucus
Johnson
Feinstein
McCaskill
Begich
Lieberman,

That's eleven Senators whose votes cannot be counted on, leaving (maybe) 49) who support.  So unless the administration can win a few in their own party back, reconciliation would fail.  But even a reconciliation process assumes that the conferees would add back a public option if it failed the first vote in the Senate, and that's highly unlikely.   Without enough receivers downfield, I don't think it's worth throwing the hail mary at the end of the first quarter and risking a costly interception.

But, like I said, this doesn't imply anything about a public option being more feasible later.