Much Ado Over Almost Nothing

With all the celebrating going on over the Finance committee vote today you would think that health care reform was a done deal and we were all going to have free coverage tomorrow morning. The truth is that this is only one fairly minor step, though admittedly getting it past this committee is a step, it is only one step.

As I previously wrote, I am relatively pleased with the proposal passed out of Finance today and I am hopeful we will eventually get a decent bill. But there are a lot of things left to do

Let’s consider what is left (and this is the short version)

1. The Senate Finance Committee has passed one version of the bill but the Senate Health/Labor/Pensions committee has passed an entirely different version so they need to work out the differences between these two bills.
2. The House is working on an entirely different set of bills and those have to be worked out to one House version.
3. Once the House and the Senate pass bills then they need to do a conference committee in order to work out a version of the bill that matches both of these bills.
4. Then they need to pass these bills over the 60 vote threshold in the Senate
5. Assuming the version they pass is acceptable to the President then the bill is passed

With each of these steps we have all of the maneuvering that is common to the legislative process.

And of course as most people have observed, none of the bills take effect immediately, most take two or three years before the go into effect. Some start taking taxes now and pay benefits later.

So it’s a step, but we are a long way from a final proposal.