This is it, folks — the health care endgame. Appropriately named Slaughter strategy, come on down!
In addition, it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.
Let’s pull together a few key issues as we go into what is in all likelihood the final week in the runup to the vote within the House of Representatives, a vote that could reshape America’s health policy and economic future.
The first and most important thing to remember: they don’t have the votes right now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t when it comes to the floor. Pelosi can only allow for 37 “No” votes from Democrats, and my current count has her at 45…but we’ll soon see how solid those are.
The chief excuse used to justify the Democrats pending use of reconciliation to pass a supplemental health care bill–once the Senate’s version is presumably passed by the House–is that since Republicans used reconciliation in the past, Democrats can use it too. And specifically, since Republicans used reconciliation for things like “tax cuts for the rich!”, Democrats can use it to pass health care.
James Joyner points out that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making this argument:
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Congress, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, James Joyner, Megan McArdle, Obama Administration, Politics, Republicans
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I am sure that at this point, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats would be delighted and relieved to ram health care reform through Congress. I almost don’t blame them; the process has been long and arduous, to say the least. But the rules keep getting in the way:
Republicans said they won a parliamentary victory as they try to fight Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.
Republicans said President Barack Obama has to sign a Senate health-care bill into law before the House and Senate can approve changes to it under a process called reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian told Republicans that a reconciliation bill has to “make changes in law,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“This would be another headwind for Democrats in the House” who oppose provisions in the Senate bill, said John Sullivan, a health-care analyst at Boston-based Leerink Swann & Co. “Their biggest fear has been that they vote for the Senate version and they never get the relief they’re looking for.”
March 11, 2010 – 12:16 pm
Here’s the worst thing you probably haven’t heard about President Barack Obama’s health care plan: it makes everything onetime vice presidential nominee John Edwards once said about the class divide of “two Americas” come true.
March 11, 2010 – 12:10 am
The Senate Democrats won’t allow your anti-abortion language through on reconciliation if the House passes the Senate’s health care reform bill.
Something to consider as you decide whether to give your vote, and the votes of the House members in your coalition to the House Democratic leadership when the Senate’s health care reform bill comes up for a vote in the House.
A closer look at the actual details of these ideas, however, shows that the White House has done very little indeed – and while it would be nice to say otherwise, the reality is that what President Obama is offering to Republicans is not an olive branch, but a rather insulting joke.
President Obama all but hinted today that he is prepared to go the reconciliation route to get health care reform. As I have argued before, this is not a proper use of the reconciliation procedure. Megan McArdle and others have pointed out that reconciliation is designed to bring revenues in line with budgetary outlays, to reconcile, in other words. It is not meant to push forth new social programs. Thus, while tax increases and cuts can be pushed through via the reconciliation process, health care reform clearly cannot. Yes, health care packages have been pushed through via the reconciliation process in the past, but this effort has less to do with bringing revenues in line with outlays, and more to do with circumventing the fact that Democrats no longer have a 60 vote majority in the Senate.
Of course, it is worth noting that once upon a time, Barack Obama agreed that transformative change of the type embodied by his health care reform package, could not possibly go through except via a supermajority:
How times have changed.
February 24, 2010 – 4:58 pm
A lot of people seem to think that prospects have improved for the White House’s vision of health care reform. Those people must not be reading the same things I am reading.
For one thing, Talking Points Memo–not exactly a right-wing rag–is telling us that according to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, health care reform will not happen unless the House passes the Senate’s health care bill first. That led to the following exchange between Brian Beutler, the author of the Talking Points Memo piece, and Conrad:
I pointed out that House leadership, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has repeatedly insisted they won’t take a flier on a reconciliation package–that they will only pass the Senate bill after the smaller side-car reconciliation bill has been all wrapped up.
“Fine, then it’s dead,” Conrad said.
Conrad added that he wouldn’t personally make any promises or symbolic gestures to House members to assure them that the Senate can or will take any action in a reconciliation bill to address House concerns.
“I don’t sign any blank check,” Conrad said.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, Jay Cost, New York, Obama Administration, Politics, Republicans, taxes
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February 23, 2010 – 5:21 pm
Here’s the problem that reconciliation predictions run into: there’s simply no way to do the math.
February 22, 2010 – 5:22 pm
Doug Elmendorf of the Congressional Budget Office reports that the CBO did not receive President Obama’s plan in advance, and still doesn’t have the actual legislative language. He writes:
We had not previously received the proposal, and we have just begun the process of reviewing it—a process that will take some time, given the complexity of the issues involved. Although the proposal reflects many elements that were included in the health care bills passed by the House and the Senate last year, it modifies many of those elements and also includes new ones. Moreover, preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.
But of course he can’t — because the White House didn’t want him to.
February 19, 2010 – 4:29 pm
The use of reconciliation to pass health care reform through the Senate would be entirely contrary to the purposes of the reconciliation process. There is, of course, every reason to think that Democrats won’t have the stomach to go through with reconciliation; the process is a lot more complicated than people think it is. Reconciliation would force Democrats to pare down their health care goals. And an attempt to use reconciliation to push through health care would destroy all hopes of bipartisan cooperation on other issues in Congress. I am sure that there are Democrats for whom none of this serves as a deterrent to using reconciliation, but plenty of other Democrats will be terrified by the consequences of reconciliation. As they ought to be.
January 25, 2010 – 12:28 am
That Massachusetts election must have been something else. Chris Matthews is laughing at Democrats now:
