They COULD still merge the House and Senate bill in Conference

and send it back to the Senate to get a floor vote.

And that COULD still be filibustered.

And if filibustered, the House COULD still just pass the current Senate bill as-is and the Senate could still fix it via reconciliation.

But doing it that way would sure as hell get the Republicans on record filibustering it...

that the Repukes don't want the 'credit' for fillibustering HCR. Since Massachusetts, they want it more than ever.

If the Democrats had stronger reform, it would be easy to frame the GOP as villians working with the insurance industry. But with this...there is something in that bill everyone hates. Filibustering will have fallout. :)

The only good thing about forcing the filibuster is the Republicans have no credibility anymore in anyone's eyes. It will be tough for them to do and not look like obstructionists.

The GOP has had the easier fight here. We've been defending something that is constantly changing, moving, fluid, with content that no one truly knows will be the end result when it's all done. All the Pukes (and their allies in talk radio) have to do is shoot whatever comes out of the bushes.

After a year of this, the reich wing has developed a constituency that cheers them on whenever they are the party of no on HCR. They'd welcome one last chance to fillibuster this, and they'd really love to see the Blue Dogs have to sweat their asses off on such a vote.

HCR is politically dead at this point, all we're seeing is a "Weekend at Bernie's" effort to pretend that something is still viable, so that someone else might just get the blame when it's revealed to be a sitting-up corpse. Calling for a vote is just going to let us see who's behind the curtain, and in the end, it will be Democratic congresscritters that don't have the stomach to go along with this.

It also allows for another round of Republicans stepping back while Democrats take shots at each other... all while the elections tick ever closer.

The we're very likely to find out that at least one (probably two) supreme court justices will be retiring this summer... and all eyes turn toward that so that we can get them confirmed before republicans pick up several seats in the Senate.

AND this still assumes that you can GET a conference bill that the House can pass. Pelosi had a few votes "in her pocket" who would have voted yes (but didn't want the political liability in their district), but now we've lost a couple seats and several supporters who have become worried about their district.

IOW... I'm not sure we can get anything through the House that's WORTH reconciliation.