Health Reform Dead? Naaahhhhhh.

Scott Brown just won the special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. Not much of a surprise if you followed the polls and the disaster that was the Martha Coakley campaign.

I really have to give Brown credit though; he ran a fantastic race. Coakley, on the other hand, literally took a vacation from December 19th-January 5th. When she actually was running, she ran as the presumptive Senator-elect -- and voters all across the country understandably hate that.

The question right now is, "is health care reform dead?" And if you want my answer, it's still "I don't think so."

Obviously, the chances for health reform did just go down by a decent margin (which, coincidentally, caused insurance stocks to go up). But it went down from, probably, a 99% chance to maybe a 55-60% chance.

The Democrats still have a decent number of options to get health reform done.

1. Try to speed up and finish the process they've already started merging the House and Senate bills, and hope to get the Senate to vote on it before Brown is confirmed (which should take around 15 days).
2. Find Olympia Snowe, dust her off, and throw her back into the game.
3. Have the House pass the Senate bill as-is, so they can send it directly to the President.

And #3 is the winner!

When talking about this, most people don't realize that if the House could swallow the bitter pill that is the as-is Senate bill, the Senate doesn't need to vote on it again, and they could send it straight to Obama.

Is that likely to happen? Will the House really swallow the Senate bill? Probably not as-is. But with some major promises and concessions from the White House and Senate leadership, I think they will. The House can easily say, "Ok. We'll vote on this, but we want this revisited in the Senate -- before the end of 2010 -- through reconciliation, or no deal." Which I think is entirely possible.

The problem with this scenario is that the House only passed their bill with 220 (out of the necessary 218) votes. How could they possibly pass the Senate bill without losing more than two votes? The upside is that the Senate bill is much more conservative than the House bill was, so some Blue Dogs might be much more willing to vote for the Senate's bill than they were the House's.

At the same time, however, they're certainly going to lose some of the progressive vote. But, in the end, I really think that Pelosi had way more than 220 votes when the House voted through their health reform legislation, and allowed many members to vote against the bill, because she didn't need their vote. Since Pelosi is a champion vote-whipper, I don't see this scenario being too far-fetched.

The other complication with this framework is that Democrats are certainly going to be running scared after they just lost Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. Understandably so. It's pretty scary. However, looking at all of the polling from the Massachusetts race, you can see that it was about local issues and candidates -- not so much Obama or his national agenda. Exit polling from Rasmussen of all places showed that 53% of today's electorate favor Obama and only 38% disapproved. So it's possible that some cooler heads will prevail, and weary Democrats will realize that Coakley ran a shit-storm of a campaign, and she probably would have won if she didn't, for example, take a vacation for three weeks before her election.

Finally, with regards to this talk, there could certainly be some new retirements from some Democrats in the near future. That is definitely possible. But we also have to remember that the case could be made that, since they don't have to worry about re-election, those congresspeople would be more inclined to vote for the health care bill -- not less.

So, wasn't I always arguing against reconciliation? And now I'm suddenly for it?

Slow down. I was against reconciliation for the entire bill, since we would have lost everything that didn't fit through that process. Things like the insurance exchanges and the consumer protection reforms that are immensely popular. I have always been for passing a base bill and using reconciliation to tweak it once it's over. Which is exactly what this process would be. I would rather the bill be more like the House's, but I can live with passing the Senate bill if it will definitely be modified through reconciliation soon afterwards.

This whole prediction brings one very big thing back into play: the public option. If I turn out to even be close to right, then we can dive into this later, but a public option certainly fits the criteria of the reconciliation process -- and it very well might be added to (a) make the bill better on cost-control and (b) try to excite the base for 2010. It's still kind of a long-shot, but it's definitely much, much more possible that we will have a public option than we did just a few hours ago.

And that is the intense irony of this entire Massachusetts election. Pundits are screaming about the ironic nature of a Republican winning Ted Kennedy's seat and killing health care reform, but I'm looking the election of Scott Brown as the under-noticed possibility that he could have saved the public option by forcing Democrats to use reconciliation. Quite ironic, huh?

If this is the case, Ted Kennedy might actually be not so mad that a Republican took his seat.

(P.S. Apologies for no links and a general lack of clarity. So many people were asking me about what I thought was going to happen to health reform, that I had to write this very quickly, so that I could send it as a response to people. I'm also extremely busy right now trying to get a new Lehigh Valley blog started up with my friends Jon and Hillary at http://www.lehighvalleyindependent.com. Take a look!)