The fate of health care reform is very much in flux after Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special election last night. For example, the House leadership has cancelled a scheduled caucus meeting on health care today, opting instead for meeting with individual members. As such, take all of these developments as very, very tentative.
Chop up the bill into many different parts? Some House members, such as John Yarmuth and Bill Delahunt, are suggesting the health care bill should be broken up into several parts, with separate votes on each. The current line from the leadership is that idea isn't on the table:
"That's off the table at this point," a Democratic leadership aide said of breaking up healthcare reform into smaller bills - such as a standalone ban on the denial of private health coverage for pre-existing conditions - and gradually chipping away at the myriad issues Democrats have identified as plaguing the healthcare system.
Pass the Senate bill through the House, improve it in reconciliation? What does seem to be on the table is pushing the Senate bill through the House, and then improving it through the budget reconciliation process. Senate Budget committee chairman Kent Conrad appears open to the idea:
The Senate Budget Committee Chairman said Wednesday he's willing to use special rules to force a final healthcare bill through with a simple majority vote.
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) made clear his openness to applying budget reconciliation to healthcare, a position he opposed prior to this week's special election in Massachusetts, is contingent on the content of the bill.(...)
"If the House passed the Senate bill, could reconciliation, that process, be used to fix things that might be improved upon? Yes," Conrad said. "Would I support it? I can't know that without knowing what would be included in the package."
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House vote counting. In November, the House passed the health care bill 220-215. Since that time, Anthony Weiner Robert Wexler has resigned from the House. Also, Barney Frank now says he will vote against the health care bill, as does Raul Grijalva. Bart Stupak has also been lost, and with him as many as nine other members of the House. It is also hard to imagine that Republican Joseph Cao would still be on board. Some more conservative, non-Stupak Democrats might defect, too.
The leadership's best hope is that the Senate bill appeals to most of these Democrats, that some members of Stupak's ten will accept Ben Nelson's opt-out compromise, that the Progressive flank is mollified by a promise to improve the bill in the budget reconciliation process. It is a longshot, but not impossible.
This is shaping up to be a remarkably huge fiasco for Democrats. This level of disaster would be worse than 1994, because the economic situation ismuch worse and because the health care bill was defeated in a dramatic fashion by one candidate.
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