Over at Time, Jay Newton-Small reports on the group of 9-11 leadership senators (depends which meeting you're looking at, and which month) who have been meeting in one of Kennedy's offices to hammer out the details of health reform. The group includes Baucus and Grassley from Finance, Rockefeller and Hatch of the Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, Kennedy and Enzi from HELP, Conrad and Gregg from Budget, and McConnell and Reid. The sticking points for the group as are they've always been: How to pay, who to tax, whether there should be a public insurance option, and whether to use reconciliation. But this part of her article caught my eye:Both chambers have said they intend to see legislation reach the floor before the August recess, though many admit the tougher part will come when the differences between the two versions must be reconciled. "The House bill will be the high water mark of what we'd like to do with the system," says one Democratic Senate staffer involved in the talks. "Still, we don't have 60 votes yet. So the House is going to have to accept, to a certain degree, what we work out here."I should probably trumpet this next sentence as a MEGA SIREN EXCLUSIVE, but shortly before the White House Health Care Summit, Pete Stark (pictured right), Chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, met with Charlie Rangel, Chair of Ways and Means; Henry Waxman, Chair of Energy and Commerce; Frank Pallone, Chair of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee; George Miller, Chair of the Committee on Education and Labor; and Fred Andrews, Chair of the Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. They agreed that a bill would be passed this year, and it would include three elements: A public insurance option, an employer mandate, and an individual mandate. In the House, of course, that agreement means something. Pelosi is likely to support whatever her chairmen support, and the House Democrats are likely to pass whatever the leadership puts forward. Reconciling with the Senate will be a harder lift. But the existence of those elements in the House bill will give a stronger hand to liberal negotiators, particularly if enough House Democrats threaten to defect from a bill that doesn't include those pieces. We're used to the Senate having the upper hand in reconciliation because its agreements are so tenuous, but if a few dozen of H.R. 676's cosponsors decide a public option is decisive for their support, Senate negotiators may lose the luxury of assuming passage of a centrist measure in the House.
