It's The Final Countdown for Health Care Reform

After more than a year of crafting, debating, speeches, protests, and summits the end of this chapter in health reform is in sight. As posted a few months ago, the leadership in leadership in Congress has several options to get to this end but due to apparent unwillingness to reach the end by Republicans (they demand that the whole process start over!), Democrats have settled on reconciliation. As I discussed in an earlier post, reconciliation is a parlimentary process that allows legislation to be passed with a majority vote and bypasses the Senate's filibuster. In order for Democrats to accomplish this reconciliation they must first have a bill that has been passed by both chambers (and some argue the President must have signed the bill), to this end, Democrats in the House will attempt to pass the Senate version of Health Care Reform without making changes. Once passed Democrats will then pass a reconciliation bill almost immediately and quickly send it to the Senate for a majority vote.

The vote outcome is by no means certain. There are a small number of Democrats who can affect the outcome of the vote and hot button issues such as abortion and the public option could be decisive in a vote that is expected to be nail bitingly close. President Obama has delayed an overseas trip so that he can work the phones over the next week. The process will begin on Monday when the House Finance Committee votes on a framework for reconciliation (see, many Democrats in the House won't vote for the Senate version without having the reconciliation bill ready to vote on right away), after which the rules committee will establish the rules for how the bill will be moved forward. The reconcilation bill has already been written and is in the process of being scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but there will likely be some final changes as the final votes are sought. Once passed in the House expect there to be some big fights in the Senate on amendments, particularly if the public option makes it into the House version.

Stay tuned, this next week will be a wild ride and perhaps historic.