President pressed the Senate Majority Leader and the House Speaker to get health care reform done quickly in time for the State of the Union speech during the first week in February — before the opposition can mount an effective grassroots campaign to scuttle the bill. To this end the Democratic leadership has agreed to bypass a formal conference, which would be fairly public, contentious and time-consuming.
However, no deadline was promised, and there was some pushback from Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the House would not simply accept the Senate bill. The plan calls for the two chambers (Reid/Durbin, Dodd/Harkin and Baucus for the Senate, and Pelosi/Hoyer, Miller, Rangel and Waxman for the House) to work on a compromise, pass it first in the House and then in the Senate. Under this “ping-pong” process, the Senate will have but one vote in which 60 Senators will have to vote “Yes.”
While it seems very unlikely that the public plan option (in the House bill) or the Medicare buy-in provision, already rejected by the Senate, will make the final cut, there are more than enough issues in conflict to keep negotiators busy for several weeks. They include: abortion; immigration; the House tax surcharge on the wealthy vs the Senate’s Cadillac tax; the insurance company tax; changing McCarran-Ferguson (pushed by the House); and increasing subsidies to low-income Americans. The current betting is that Democrats will get a bill to the President for signing sometime in the coming weeks, but there is absolutely no margin for error.