ABC's Jake Tapper gives us an early look into what the president's proposal for HCR's way forward will entail. It will call for the House to pass the Senate bill ASAP, but then immediately proceed to a sidecar bill of "fixes" that will be passed by up-or-down vote in the House and Senate. He will stress how critical reform is, bringing up the pending rate hike from Anthem/Blue Cross of California and other companies all across the country desperate to keep their profit margins as high as they were pre-recession. The proposed reconciliation sidecar will nix the Nebraska and Florida medicaid deal and include the creation of a Health Insurance Rate Authority run by the Department of Health and Human Services to regulate and monitor any proposed rate increases.
Read the quoted article after the fold.
From ABC News:
The plan to pass the bill includes having the House of Representatives pass the Democratic Senate health care reform legislation as well as a second bill containing various "fixes."
The president will call for an up or down vote on health care reform, as has happened in the past, and though he won't use the word "reconciliation," he'll make it clear that if they're not given an up or down vote, Democrats will use the reconciliation rules as Republicans have done in the past.
White House officials will make the argument these rules are perfectly appropriate because the procedure is not being used for the whole bill, just for some fixes; because reconciliation rules are traditionally used for deficit reduction and health care reform will reduce the deficit; and because the reconciliation process has been used many times by Republicans for larger legislation such as the tax cuts pushed by President George W. Bush.
Jake Tapper ends his article pretty decisively:
Mr. Obama will say that he will be working on exact legislative language in the next few days. Republicans can join him and Democratic congressional leaders of the House and Senate to makes these changes and to pass the bill, but either way the bill will be moving forward.
I cannot comment much on this as it's pretty late, but I'm going to say that this sounds pretty good. As for the public option, it can still be passed. If not this time around, then perhaps by tacking it on to an appropriations bill down the road. After all, Ted Kennedy fought for years to raise the national minimum wage above the pitiful $5.15 set in 1997 and finally succeeded by making the minimum wage increase a part of a war spending bill in 2007. He never said "screw it" and gave up on fighting for a livable wage.