According to this CNN article, Democrats are trying to essentially nationalize the student loan market. The purpose of this thread is not to discuss that issue. What I would like to discuss is this point.
[QUOTE=CNN]
the White House continues to push to link the student loan issue to a health care vote … Democratic lawmakers have been planning to stick student loans and health care together in a procedural move called “reconciliation,” which avoids filibusters with a simple 51-vote majority … Democrats are considering abandoning the student loan issue if it threatens passage of health care … “If House leadership believes that education language could leave the Senate short of the 50 votes it needs to pass a reconciliation bill, the House very well may drop the education portion,” said Teddy Downey, a policy analyst for Concept Capital Washington Research Group.
[/QUOTE]
First of all, is this correct? It seems incredibly odd that an overhall of the student loan market would be included in the Healthcare bill. Second, if true, what is the possible rationale for tieing the two issues into a single bill. Third, the article states that the CBO estimates that this student loan overhall would save $67 billion over ten years. Are these savings included when the potential savings from the healthcare plan are stated?
The answer is in the cited article. It is going in the healthcare bill because it would then be covered by reconciliation. The Dems expect (probably rightly) that the Republicans would filibuster this attempt to save money.
I very much doubt that the savings are included in healthcare savings estimates, which were done long before the proposal to tie this to healthcare.
Now we all can ask why this is necessary in any sort of a functioning Senate.
BTW, this is not nationalizing student loans. That is already the case, because the government guarantees the loans. This is just changing the way they are administered. Itis the same as if someone called removing the Medicare Advantage nonsense “nationalizing” Medicare.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on reconciliation, but wouldn’t the student loan reform be able to be passed by reconciliation outside of the healthcare bill?
At what point in the healthcare bill was the student loan reform added?
The “healthcare bill” will have already been passed, provided the House votes in favor of the Senate bill which passed before Christmas. There won’t be a reconciliation bill until after the health care bill is signed. The reconciliation bill (which will amend the by then already in law health care bill) will contain some student loan stuff but that’s not terribly unusual for a budget reconciliation bill to be multi-faceted like that.
For example, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (best known as COBRA and for its insurance provisions) also included a host of other things (quote per Wiki):
It’s not in the health care bill. It would be added to a reconciliation bill which can cover a host of different budgetary measures.