Health Care: A Reader Request

Posted: October 27th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

A reader emailed yesterday asking what I made of Harry Reid’s decision to bring the public option back from the dead, and whether I could explain the politics and policy in lay terms. Here’s what I wrote [some day-after edits in parens]:

Basically, the various committees in the Senate and the House have each developed their own bills, which have passed the committee’s own votes. Harry Reid, as Senate leader, gets to take those bills and combine them into a NEW bill, which the whole Senate then votes on. It has to get 60 votes to pass a [procedural] barrier called cloture. Basically, 60 Sens vote for it, and after that, the Senate has 30 hours before it has to pass the bill or not. During those 30 hours, they can consider amendments relevant to the bill but cannot consider any other policy matters. And on those amendments, only 51 votes are needed.


Once the full Senate passes the bill, that version goes back to the House, where they can either pass it as is, OR if they tweak it too, the full Senate has to re-vote on it. That can be dangerous, because the House is further left than the Senate and is likely to add things the Senate won’t pass. So Reid is likely to try and manage the negotiations such that the Senate votes on the bill in a form the House can quickly pass and send straight to the Prez. It seems that the Schumer opt-out version of the pub-op is the one that can potentially get through both House and Senate.

How can it get through the Senate? Two ways–either Reid knows of a few senators who will vote for it but haven’t said so yet, in which case, he writes it INTO the bill he brings to the floor and it gets 60 votes at cloture, after which they tweak/amend some and its over. OR he can only get the 50+ votes for it we know about right now in which case he DOESN’T put it in. They get 60 votes cloture on a bill sans public option, and then introduce the pub-op AS an amendment, at which point they only need to get 51.

On the policy of this [opt-out] version of the pub-option: I’m not a fan but it’s better than the Snowe trigger compromise. Read the rest of this entry »