Carl Hulse has a piece in today’s New York Times about House Democrats’ tentative plans — which Hulse (rather bizarrely) says are being kept very close to the vest — to pass health care reform legislation via reconciliation. The major obstacle to doing so, however, is something called the “Byrd Rule,” which limits the use of reconciliation to bills intended to fund existing legislation (h/t Steve):
To greatly oversimplify, what this means is that it’s almost impossible to use reconciliation to build something new. You can expand Medicare or shrink it, cut taxes or raise them. But to construct something that doesn’t already exist will inevitably require provisions that don’t in themselves have a significant budgetary impact: regulations, structures, guidelines, realigned bureaucracies. In particular, much of the structure of health insurance exchanges that are envisioned in the House and HELP Committee bills would not survive the Byrd Rule axe. Only the flimsiest outlines of a health reform bill would survive – the financing would be there, but not the structures to ensure that the money would be used properly. Further, reconciliation would give the Finance Committee – which controls the money – even more clout over the more liberal HELP committee.
Zandar has had it up to here (as have I) with conservative Democrats like Kent Conrad whining about the “evils” of reconciliation (emphasis is Zandar’s):
But here’s what really bothers me about the Times article: listening to Sen. Kent Conrad complain about reconciliation…a deal he signed on to back in April.
Mr. Conrad, who is one of the Democrats bargaining with Republicans, has been advising that fashioning a health care plan under byzantine reconciliation rules is a bad idea. From his perspective, a major impediment is the fact that the plans devised by the Senate finance and health panels would have to produce $2 billion in savings over five years and not add to the deficit after that.
Considering the upfront costs of trying to bring all Americans under the health insurance umbrella, and the fact that some of the structural health care changes that lawmakers are eyeing might not produce immediate savings, the deficit rules could severely limit the scope of a bill.
“You would have a very difficult time getting universal coverage in reconciliation,” Mr. Conrad said.
Here’s a question I have for the Senator: Why do we even need reconciliation in the first place when Democrats have a huge margin in the house and 60 votes in the Senate? There should be no need for reconciliation: none whatsoever.That is unless Democrats like Kent Conrad aren’t committed to getting the President’s goals into legislation and passing them in the bill. If that’s the case, then Democrats have a bit of an issue.
Not to tell Rahmbo, Orszag and the Axe how to do their job, but any Democratic senator yammering on about the evils of reconciliation in the Village Press should have a big ol’ target on them for some serious arm-twisting action over August. You want to know where to put those ad blitzes proclaiming ordinary Americans need health care reform?
Via Memeorandum.
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