Delaware Liberal

Fixing The Health Care Bill

Ezra Klein has an idea…

Health reform, remember, is a long game. The Senate Finance Committee will not write the health reform bill. They will just write their version of it. Then it will merge with the HELP Committee’s version. Then it will be amended on the floor of the Senate. Then it will be merged with the House’s health reform bill in a process called “conference committee.” Then that bill will return for a final vote.

So here’s a question that few have asked, and that virtually no one knows the answer to: How important is conference committee to the way the White House is looking at health care? I’ve heard it’s pretty important. Heard the same thing about Harry Reid, actually. If that’s true, then this is what the Democratic leadership is thinking: The overriding imperative right now is to keep health reform alive. That’s all that matters. Get it out of the Finance Committee. Get it off the Senate floor. If it’s cut down to half a loaf, fine. You don’t fix it now. You fix it in conference. Or you let Henry Waxman do it for you.

It passed because it’s hard to filibuster bills emerging from conference. You can’t change them, for one thing. No amendments are allowed. Nor is there time for debate. You vote for the bill, you vote against the bill, or you filibuster the bill. Those are your options. Democrats are likely to walk out of conference committee with 60 senators in their party. Ben Nelson will not be able to ask to change this bit he doesn’t like, and Evan Bayh will not be allowed to offer an amendment weakening that piece. They stand with the White House or against it. And it is, in the estimation of most observers I’ve talked to, hard to imagine them literally filibustering the final vote on health reform. The White House would torture them until they lost reelection. And if no Democrats are willing to filibuster, then the White House could lose as many as 10 of them and still pass the bill.

Count me as one of the people who thinks that there will be health care reform this year. Obama knows that this will be his legacy, this will be what he is judged on. It’s in his best interest to get the best bill possible. The process of making legislation is very messy, as we’ve seen before. I think that Obama is just beginning to up the pressure on lawmakers, so we’ll see what happens.

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