Passing Health Care Reform: reconciliation

[TayTay]

There are a lot of reports flying around about the hows and whys of passing health care reform in the Congress. One thing that we hear about a lot is having the Senate Democrats pass health care as part of the budget reconciliation process. This is hardly a great way to pass something as huge as health care reform. Reconciliation should be a last resort when all else fails and it should be done with the understanding that we will only get about 25 - 40% of what we want under that process.

The budget for the US govt, really 13 budgets, is passed under a 2 part system. In the US Senate, a budget resolution is passed in the first part of the year that lays out a framework for the overall amounts of money to be spent. This includes rough figures on how much each of the 13 federal agencies of the govt, agriculture, defense, etc., are going to get for the year. After this budget resolution is passed, each federal agency then has it's separate budget submitted for the legislative process. Hearings are held and the final budget goes through a committee "markup" session where members of the committee can offer amendments to the budget bill to alter funding. The markup bill can then go to the Senate floor for passage, be "reconciled" with the US House version and one final, identical bill that has passed both Congressional chambers can go to the President for his signature.

The process of matching up the budget resolution with the actual funding bills is what is called reconciliation. The US Senate has put in place rules that govern what can and cannot be added to a bill during this process. These rules were actually strengthened this year with the adoption of more stringent "pay-go" rules that stipulate that any monies added to the budget have to be paid for or offset with a cut to money elsewhere in that department.

The Senate officially added the Byrd Rules to their governing rules of order in the 1985-86 session. This rule states that anything that adds to the budget can be challenged during Senate floor debate and subject to a ruling by the Senate Parliamentarian for adding cost to the bill, or for other reasons. It is the Byrd Rule that would make submitting health care reform as an amendment extremely hazardous. The Republicans would almost certainly object to the HELP or the House bill as an amendment. The way to resolve a challenge is with a 3/5th vote or 60 Senators. That would be the same as a filibuster on the whole bill. So, the only way through reconciliation would be for a series of amendments, who knows how many, that could all be challenged under the Byrd Rule. We could wind up with a mandate without insurance company reforms, for instance.

Anyway, for the wonky among you, I tracked down the info on the Byrd Rule. There is a huge amount of misinformation on how the Senate works out in liberal blogland. There are a lot of voices who think it is easy for the Senate to just pass something as massive as hc reform under the budget reconciliation process. It is decidedly not easy and it could result in a disastrous bill that is far worse than anything we have seen proposed yet.

Congress Research Service: http://budget.house.gov/crs-reports/RL30862.pdf">Byrd Rule in the Senate

Except from the Byrd Rule on a post I did for DU : G , http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=8593429&mesg_id=8593429">link here