ObamaCare & Reconciliation

I'll leave it up to you to judge the sincerity and intentions of Obama regarding yesterday's little show:

Charles Krauthammer: On yesterday’s health-care summit:

After seven and a half hours, the president reveals the purpose [of the meeting] practically in the last minute, in which he said: We're going to give it a month or so. We're going to see if we can agree.

Obviously they are not going to agree. Obviously this was all about giving the appearance of reaching out for other ideas. And it was all about setting the premise for a pivot to reconciliation, i.e., meaning the Democrats are going to try to ram it through on a procedural trick in the Senate and try to cobble the votes required in the House.

Now, I think the Democrats actually helped themselves in the process. They did have a seven and a half hour show in which it appeared as if they were genuinely open. I think it was quite cynical, but I think it allowed at least them to argue to independents, who want to see a kind of an ecumenical effort, [that]: We tried. We went the last mile. And we failed. So in order to get health-care reform, we had to go by this partisan procedure.

However, on the other hand, the Republicans really helped themselves. The argument [was that they are] the party of no, they have no ideas, they are against anything, they're nihilists.
In fact, they spent seven hours, I think, presenting a very strong case. They're knowledgeable. They have ideas. They are interested in reform. But they have differences.

Lamar Alexander was dazzling. Paul Ryan was rapier sharp in rebutting all of the smoke and mirrors that the Democrats had presented.

I think it's going to help the Republicans in November on their image. But in the short run, it's going to help the Democrats in trying to ram the thing through.

On reconciliation:

It's a trick because Senator Byrd, who invented it ... said it was never intended for anything like this. It is a trick in the sense that it was ... designed as a way to harmonize budgets and ... raise taxes and cut spending. It was never designed as a way to execute a reform for a sixth of the economy.


Someone else:

The Democrats came to the summit armed with constituent stories illustrating the single point on which there is no disagreement: something needs to be done about health care in America. President Obama respectfully listened to these stories without comment.

Eric Cantor came to the meeting armed with a copy of the bill that represents the central purpose of this gathering. And the president gratuitously mocked the presence of the bill as an irrelevant political prop.

This told me everything I needed to know about the summit.


Dems: 'We are NOT Doing a Scaled Back Bill' [Daniel Foster]

If it is all-or-nothing for the Democrats on the health-care bill, at this point I'd wager — at even money — on "nothing."

They need 217 votes, a majority of the 432 members currently in Congress. They don’t have them right now.

If the House doesn’t have the votes, senior White House officials say they would like Congress to pursue a more modest health care reform bill.

But there seems little desire for that among House Democrats, who would like to focus on jobs.
“We are NOT doing scaled back bill,” a senior House leadership source emails ABC News.
Full story here. Tapper also notes that Rep. Marion "The Difference Is Me" Berry (D., Ark.) has not decided how he is going to vote this time around.

UPDATE: Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) says (for whatever it is worth) that he doesn't know if Democrats have the votes to do a comprehensive bill:

"We may be forced to doing healthcare — to use my analogy — by making a pie a piece at a time, which is typically not the preferred way to handle legislation," the senator added. "But this is so big, and has so many moving parts and has so many supporters and detractors, that maybe that's the only thing you can do. Grab a piece of it here, grab a piece of it there and try to put together as much of it as you can."