WaPo reports and many diarists have noted that House Democrats appear ready to drop plans to deem the Senate health insurance reform bill passed with a self-executing rule.
That won't make much of a difference at this point. Everybody knows what's at stake, and which votes mean what. Members have by this time steeled themselves for what needs to be done.
But the option to pass the reconciliation bill first, at least in the House, should still be available to them if they want it. The original plan for using the self-executing rule contemplated just that, anyway. That is, the Senate bill was only going to be deemed passed once the House had passed the reconciliation bill. So clearly the House parliamentarian had no particular problem allowing the reconciliation fix to be brought to the floor before the language it would amend (contained in the main Senate bill) was signed into law.
That's possibly because it only takes a majority vote to waive points of order and other procedural objections to reconciliation in the House, whereas the Senate most often requires 60 votes to do the same. And if a majority exists for passage, then it's presumed that a majority would exist for any necessary waivers. In fact, there need be no presuming at all, since the rule for consideration of the reconciliation bill can explicitly waive them.
So that preserves the House's ability -- if they want it -- to vote on the fixes before voting on the less popular Senate bill, and doing so with separate votes puts the House at no disadvantage versus the result that would have obtained with the use of the self-executing rule. You still pass the fix through the House first, before completing work on the Senate bill.
And again, if they do that, that helps settle the question so many people had about whether or not you could vote on language amending a bill that hadn't yet become law. You can, and up until a few minutes ago, the plan was to structure procedure such that that was the only possible outcome. House Dems now have a choice about what order they approach things in. And really, the Senate likely bill won't have been signed by the President at the time that the reconciliation bill is passed in the House, even if they opt to take it up second. I suppose they could opt to wait a few days to vote on reconciliation, but I doubt they'll want to.