Reid: Democrats will use reconciliation to finish health-care reform

Big, encouraging news on health-care reform today: Harry Reid says that Senate Democrats will use the reconciliation process to finish the bill within the next 60 days.

I've noticed some confusion about what this means, so some quick context: Reid is not talking about rewriting the bill or passing the whole thing through reconciliation. He's talking about passing a small package of fixes through reconciliation so that the House and Senate bills come into alignment.

This is actually the sort of situation reconciliation was designed to address, as Brookings' Henry Aaron explains here (pdf). Budget reconciliation is called "reconciliation" because it's supposed to speed the, well, reconciliation of the differences between two budget bills. That's exactly what's left to do with the health-care reform bills, which were indeed part of the 2010 budget and whose passage is expected in the 2011 budget.

Because this is what the process is actually meant to do, it doesn't present the manifold problems of using reconciliation for the entire bill. Things like the insurance market reforms have passed with 60 votes in the Senate and 220 in the House. They're done. What's left are some tweaks to the way the bill spends and raises money (that is to say, tweaks to its budget implications) that are needed to, yes, reconcile the two bills. Reconciliation works for this because reconciliation was designed to do this.

Photo credit: Bloomberg

