Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said… Friday… that while Democrats have a number of options, they would likely use the budget reconciliation process to pass a series of fixes to the first healthcare bill passed by the Senate in November. These changes are needed to secure votes for passage of that original Senate bill in the House… "We're going to have that done in the next 60 days." The move would allow Democrats to essentially go it alone on health reform… Republicans have protested the maneuver… Reid said that the final Democratic bill is likely to be unveiled Monday night.
Sixty days hence I may roll my eyes to recall getting rolled again by all this, but if the movement we are seeing bespeaks underlying realities at all then even a comparatively shitty outcome (as anything short of a robust PO and ending of the insurance company monopoly exemption is liable to look as an entirely abstract rather than tactical matter to folks like me who pine for Single Payer/Medicare For All) is still an utter game-changer in terms of shifting the institutional healthcare terrain in the direction of sanity, not to mention questions of relative partisan base energization and electoral possibilities of the mid-terms. I refuse to get hopey until I see substance (I'm battling another flu bug -- students, I blame you! -- which is tapping my native hopeyness resources in any case) but you better believe I'll be feeling it in sixty days if this isn't another football Lucy is gingerly placing on the field to punch hippies with.
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