71803448CS016_Senate_Holds_The online news site Salon used U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman as an example of Senate Democrats work on health care reform in an unflattering piece called Why Senate Democrats are giving up so easily.

“Bingaman may be the prime example of the way some Senate Democrats seem to have approached the healthcare debate this summer: count votes first, figure out what should be in the bill later,” Salon’s Mike Madden writes.

Madden cites the fact that New Mexico “badly” needs health care reform — 22 percent of New Mexicans currently are without any health care. Also, Bingaman, New Mexico’s senior senator, voted for a bill with a “strong public option” coming out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (commonly known as HELP) Committee.

The current debate on health care legislation is coming from the Senate Finance Committee, where a so-called “Gang of Six” — which includes Bingaman — has dominated the discussion. So far, their work has gone nowhere and, in fact, Bingaman has begun to voice support for non-profit health co-ops as an alternative to the public option.

Just yesterday, at a reportedly sometimes-contentious town hall meeting in Clovis, Bingaman voiced support for the public option, but shaded it with the caveat that he wouldn’t say no to a co-op either.

As would be expected for a conservative part of the state, many of those who attended the meeting were against health care reform (or as the headline of the story says ‘Obamacare’).

Which all leads Madden to pessimistically (from the pro-reform point of view, at least) write, “If even Bingaman — the only Democrat who sits on both committees with jurisdiction over the reform bill, whose state might need a change more than any other — isn’t a reliable vote for the public option, who is?”