In addition to the release of the Senate health care bill this evening (Senate Democratic caucus meeting, 5 p.m. eastern, with CBO score), the buzz today is that Senate majority leader Harry Reid won't use reconciliation for health care reform. This would reduce the chances of passing a public option in the bill, given that Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu have to committed to voting for cloture on a bill with a public option.
However, the actual article reporting that Reid won't use reconciliation this isn't quite so definitive:
In a meeting Nov. 16 with Democrats who support a Medicare-like public option, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., indicated that he did not plan to try to move a health bill through reconciliation, other Democrats said.
"I'm not going to quote him, but suffice to say, after the meeting was over I thought it was unlikely," said Bob Casey, D-Pa.
Regan LaChapelle, a spokeswoman for Reid, said, "We are not ruling anything out, but Sen. Reid is continuing to work to put together a bill that will garner the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.
Not sure how much this actually changes anything. "Unlikely" isn't the same thing as "never." Reconciliation rarely came to the forefront in public discussions of health care, which almost always made it pretty "unlikely" that the Senate would use reconciliation. In fact, back in April, the Senate did not even include an option to use reconciliation health care in the budget, and only added it later on at the behest of the House.
The remaining questions are reconciliation are two-fold:
- If the current bill reaches an impasse as the final vote nears, is Reid more willing to make concessions to Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln, Nelson and others than he is to use reconciliation? The answer is probably "more willing to make concessions."
- How late in the game can the bill still be split into two, with the regulatory measures passing through 60 votes and things like the public option passing with only 51? The answer here, I believe, is as late as the conference committee between the House and Senate. Right up until the very end.
Really, it was never very likely that the Senate would use reconciliation, so I'm not sure this changes much. Then again, it was never very likely that the Senate would include a public option of any sort in the health care bill, and that did happen.
There is still a long time to go in this process--a minimum of three weeks until the conference committee, for example. If it is apparent that reconciliation is the only way to get a good bill, it still doesn't seem impossible that it can be used. It is a longshot, but it wlways was a longshot.
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