It's Sunday morning ... where does health care reform stand right now?

Factual Questions
1

I just heard on the tube that the Senate Finance Committee will vote on its bill Tuesday.

Will that exact bill go to the senate floor at some time (and when?) or does it have to be merged with another senate bill? If so how does that happen?

I have no idea where the house bill(s) stand at the moment…what needs to happen there next and when is it likely to happen?

2

When a bill comes out of committee, it is debated on the floor of the Senate, amendments are offered and voted on, then the whole bill is voted on. Then differences with the House version are worked out in the Conference Committee before it is sent to the President for signing.

Here is the whole process, from drafting the bill to signing by the President.

3

How does the Conference Committee work when there are significant differences between the houses? Like, say the House votes yes on a bill with a public option, but the Senate votes yes on one without. Does the Conference Committee just choose one, or does it have to go back to one of the houses to be re-passed?

4

Here’s another explanation. :smiley:

5

After passing through Conference, the final bill still has to be passed by both houses, so that the end result is that both houses will have voted on the floor for the full bill that goes to the President (indeed, I suspect doing otherwise would be unconstitutional).

6

I was looking for info more specific to the current situation …

  1. Are there other committees in the Senate that have a bill that needs to be combined with the Finance Committee’s bill before it goes to the Senate floor?

  2. Does the House have one bill now or are multiple bills still being worked on there?

  3. What is the timing for whatever happens next in the House?

7
  1. Yes, the Health, something, labor , something (I don’t remember) committee bill was also passed out of committee. So the next step is Harry Reid combines the two and presents them to the floor to be amended and voted on. I don’t think there’s any public timeline for this, but presumably combining the two will involve some vote-counting and horse-trading to make sure the result will pass, so I imagine it will be a few weeks before it finally gets voted on by the full senate.

ETA: Not sure about your other questions, I sort of lost track of where the House bill was.

8

Hmmmmmm … I thought that multiple committees were involved in the House and didn’t realize they had reconciled them nor do I recall the whole house voting on one.

Maybe they don’t have to??

9

Not getting much help here… here’s what I think I’ve learned since the Tuesday Senate Finance Committee vote:

There is a second Senate committee that passed a bill quite a while ago. Those two bills need to be combined and it will be done solely by Democrats without much public awareness and then brought to the floor for debate and vote.

Four committees in the House also passed bills… they are probably working on combining them as well but there hasn’t been much public awareness there either.

Once bills pass both houses they need to be combined by a conference committee made up of members of both houses so that there is one bill. I anticipate that process to be Democrat only and not very public as well.

Then that final bill needs to be passed first by the Senate and then by the house.

Please correct me if I’m wrong and certainly there are other pertinent details that could be added.

10

I think you have the basics correct, although I think the “Democrat only” bits are superfluous – that is, the process is never very public, no matter which party is in charge.

One thing that’s noteworthy, from a news segment I saw this past week (maybe on The Rachel Maddow show?), is that the Speaker of the House has significant power here, while the Senate majority leader has very little. More explicitly, the Speaker gets to put the House draft together, picking and choosing the bits and pieces to cobble together with little restriction. The Senate majority leader, OTOH, is subject to a host of procedural rules that effectively makes the process akin to herding cats.

Like you, I’d be happy to be corrected…

11

That’s interesting about the Speaker… I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the three bills in that house passed their respective committees quite a while ago and there is little or no news at all about what’s happening on that side.

It also could be due to the fact that conventional wisdom is that the Senate bill is more moderate and closer to the likely end result.

I see that the Senate bill emerged yesterday and went to the CBO for scoring… still very little news on what is actually in it.

You are right that these processes are “never very public” … one might think this one would be different given the magnitude.