It's not 100% official but senators working on a compromise to the health care reform bill seem to have given up hope that the Medicare buy-in - or any public option for that matter - will be in the final package.

Joe Lieberman has apparently derailed this notion, despite saying a few months ago that he would support a Medicare buy-in. Allah at Hot Air has some interesting thoughts:

Lieberman said he can (read: will) vote for the bill without the public plan provisions. Reaction, straight off the top of my head: (1) Kind of surprising that neither Snowe nor Collins defected to bail Reid out, eh? Now that he's back to 60-ish, I wonder if they or Nelson, Bayh, Lincoln, etc. will suddenly ramp up their own demands. (2) The Democrats are so frantic to pass something at this point - e.g., there was a rumor floated earlier today that Emanuel was pressuring Reid to use reconciliation - that Pelosi will almost certainly want to ping-pong the Senate bill. Will the absence of a public option convince Blue Dogs who voted no on the House bill to vote yes this time or will the gruesome polling scare them away? If they do vote yes, are there enough of them to make up for the number of House progressives who will surely vote no this time? (3) Further to the last point, what about the abortion conflict now? The House bill banned abortion funding, the Senate bill allows it. If Bart Stupak and his pro-life Blue Dogs are serious, they can probably kill the whole project. I wonder if Reid will let Nelson reintroduce an abortion funding ban in the Senate and force it through to eliminate that problem. I still don't see how they're getting this all done by New Year's, though.