The news of the last few days has been filled with the stories about a compromise that will allow a bill to pass out of the Senate. To listen to some of the commentators, especially on the left, this makes health care reform a done deal.
I hate to rain on this victory parade but given the details that are coming out I don’t see how the package can possibly make it through conference.
Let’s start in the Senate. Now we supposedly have a bill that lacks a full public option which would appease those opposed to such a proposal. But I still do not see how this gets them to 60 votes. Ben Nelson has been pretty clear about not supporting a bill w/o a version of the Stupak amendment. I suspect there may be a couple more Democrats in conservative states who may have similar problems (remember that there are people who support abortion rights but not government funding of same).
In addition there have been comments by Senator Sanders that indicate he (and perhaps some of his colleagues) would not support a bill that lacks a public option. That could cost several more votes in the Senate.
Since they need all of the Democrats (or absent that some Republicans) to support the bill or it won’t pass out.
Then assuming the bill passes, we have the issue of the conference committee. We’d have a bill from the House with a public option but without abortion funding and a bill from the Senate without a public option but with abortion funding. How exactly to you mix those two ?
The House bill barely passed and did so in part because of the Stupak amendment. So if they strip that from the conferenced bill then they may not have votes in the House (this presumes that they somehow get 60 votes for a non Stupak bill in the Senate). If you put in the Stupak amendment then you are going to have trouble passing the bill through the Senate as many liberals won’t support such a bill (Sanders, Mikulski, Boxer, etc).
On the other hand the bill will at best barely pass the Senate without a public option. Stick the public option back in and you likely lose votes in the Senate, and so the bill does not pass there. On the other hand if you go with the Senate version it is going to be tough to get the same liberals as above to support the bill.
I do suppose it is possible that if the psuedo public option makes it through the Senate bill that members in the House could be persuaded to support the bill but I do not see how the abortion issue will be resolved. The House seems unwilling to pass a bill without Stupak and the Senate seems unwilling to pass a bill with it.
I see several possible scenarios panning out.
One is that they pass this compromise proposal out of the Senate before Christmas and make a big fuss about that but then send it to conference in January. From that point they have to deal with the mess above and I’m not sure how they resolve that.
Another is that they don’t pass anything before Christmas because they want to spend Christmas break trying to figure out some way to resolve the problem with the conflict. An alternative to this is they somehow manage to work out the conflict ahead of time.
In any case I think that any thought of a real public option, let alone a single payer plan, is pretty much dead at this point. They simply can’t get it through the Senate with a public option as part of the bill. How they deal with the abortion issue is even stickier, the best option there would be some modified version of Stupak where they clearly ban any form of government funding but allow some non government option to slip through.
But it is going to be a long and difficult road for them to hoe.