Pssst. Finance Isn't the Only Relevant Committee.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/pssst-finance-isnt-the-only-relevant-committee


Pssst. Finance Isn't the Only Relevant Committee.

Jonathan Cohn



So much has been said about Max Baucus and the Finance Committee for the last few days that it's easy to forget that four other committees are supposed to have a say in the matter.

In the Senate, there is the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which passed its own version of reform way back in July. HELP's bill was, admittedly, only a partial measure. Because of its limited jurisdiction, it couldn't propose changes to taxes or to Medicare and Medicaid, huge swaths of the health care enterprise. But three House committees working on health reform operated under no such restrictions. They passed full pieces of legislation, complete with financing and changes to the two giant government entitlement programs.

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Of course, we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world in which the U.S. Senate, with its skewed apportionment of seats, holds sway. And that brings us to the second reason the House and HELP bills don't get taken as seriously: Everybody assumes nothing close to either one of them could pass the Senate, given the need to round up at least a few centrist Democrats and possibly a Republican or two in order to pass legislation.

There's some truth here. Conservative Democrats and Republicans seem unwilling to pass legislation that contributes to higher deficits (even if, annoyingly, many of these same members didn't give a second thought to deficits when passing tax cuts and the Medicare drug benefit under President Bush's watch). This is a big reason why the White House has pushed the fiscal conservatism line as hard as it has.

But the expectation that fiscal conservatism will win out over coverage also has a certain self-fulfilling quality to it. Liberals don't have a ton of leverage right now, but they do have some. Centrist Democrats, at least, understand that failing to pass any legislation would hurt their party and that, ultimately, many of them hold the party's most vulnerable seats. And if that's still not enough to get sixty votes, there's always the reconciliation process--which carries its own political risks but can, at the end of the day, produce decent legislation.

When--er, if--legislation gets out of the Senate Finance Committee, it must be merged with the HELP bill before it goes to the full Senate. And if the Senate agrees on a package, that legislation will have to go to conference committee, to be merged with its House counterpart. The policy that process produces will be much better if the Finance bill ends up looking more like the HELP and House measures. And the surest way to make that happen is to keep reminding everybody that those HELP and House measures exist.

The biggest reason why health care reform was in danger of stalling out was because Blue Cross Baucus was slow-walking his committee and holding up the show.

He's finally been forced to crap out his turd of a bill onto the Senate floor, and now we can take control away from him.

Now, the obstacle's going to be the Party of No, and we're gonna have to use reconciliation to push health care reform through the Senate. But we are a step closer to real health care reform.

There's a reason why Obama's doing the full Ginsberg and speaking up on all the bobblehead shows this Sunday, and why he's making lots of other appearances stumping hard for health care reform.

We still need to push hard to make sure we get a halfway decent public option, but I think that if we continue to demand it and show Congress that support is strong for the public option, we're likely to get one.