The Hill is reporting that Senate Budget Chair Kent Conrad is cautiously open to using reconciliation to solve the HCR conundrum:
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.
His comments lend weight to speculation that congressional Democratic leaders plan to have the House pass the Senate healthcare reform without changes, then pass a second bill with changes hashed out between the two chambers' leaders and the White House.
Kent Conrad's is going to be cautious about everything, but this is an encouraging development. It suggests that the Senate really does recognize the difficulty of getting to 218 in the House, as Barney Frank's call to kill the bill suggests.
"I think the measure that would have passed, that is, some compromise between the House and Senate bill, which I would have voted for, although there were some aspects of both bills I would have liked to see change, I think that's dead," Frank said in an interview Wednesday morning on Sirius-XM Radio. "It is certainly the case that the bill that would have passed, a compromise between the House and Senate bills, isn't going to pass, in my judgment, and certainly shouldn't."
I'm still not entirely sure what Frank was saying there, but with Conrad being at least open to this possibility, the bill needn't be killed. Don't kill the bill, improve the bill. There is still the opportunity to fix it, both in terms of policy and politics, by drafting a reconciliation bill that the House can agree to, and passing it and the Senate bill both.
It's a strange day to be agreeing with Kent Conrad over Barney Frank, but on this one, I do. Don't kill the bill. Fix it.