This is your Senate Finance Committee:

These people have jurisdiction over major elements of the health care bill that is being crafted in the Senate. As the name of the committee suggests, their primary jurisdiction is over how to finance the plan. The equivalent committee in the House is the called Ways & Means and is chaired by Charlie Rangel of Harlem, New York. Rangel’s committee decided on a plan that raises a lot of revenue by taxing individuals who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year (and couples who make more than $380,000/year). This income surtax goes up progressively, hitting millionaires most heavily. It will only affect the top 1.2% of American taxpayers.

The Senate Finance Committee wants no part of Rangel’s plan. So far, they do not appear to even want a public option in the health care bill. The New York Times reports:

…the Finance Committee, including a bipartisan team of six negotiators, is expected to continue working on the health care legislation this week. Mr. Baucus, the committee chairman, has told colleagues that he will give the bipartisan group until Sept. 15 to reach a deal, or he will press ahead for action by the full committee.”

The three Republicans in that bipartisan group are Ranking Member Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Ranking Member of the HELP Committee Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. When the HELP committee wrote up their version of the health care bill, Sen. Enzi was a complete obstructionist and no Republicans on his committee voted for the final product. But, now that Enzi is serving in his capacity as a member of the Finance Committee, things are supposed to be different? I suppose they could be, but only if the Finance Bill comes out negating everything that was done by Chris Dodd’s HELP Committee. As for Chuck Grassley, he’s made it clear that he won’t support anything that looks remotely like what the HELP Committee produced, let alone the bills produced by the House’s Ways & Means, Education & Labor, and Energy & Commerce committees. We have four bills to look at, and we’re just waiting for the fifth and final version from Max Baucus’s Finance Committee. Baucus has the votes to pass something without any Republican support, but it is not certain that all 60 Democrats in the Senate will support the bills that have been produced so far. It would be helpful if at least one Republican could be brought over to support the bill in case a Democrat like Ben Nelson of Nebraska defects.

But, on the Finance Committee, only Olympia Snowe of Maine shows any trace of receptiveness to voting for the health care bill. And, I don’t think she’s likely to vote for a public option. Given these facts, it’s very likely that even if Baucus can convince Snowe to vote for the Finance version of the bill, she will probably vote against the bill on the Senate floor and on the
conference report vote of the bill once it has been reconciled with the House version.

Chasing after Snowe’s vote is a fool’s game. I don’t think we will have 60 votes for a public option, so the Senate will have to pass the bill in the budget reconciliation process after October 15th. In that process, the bill will only require 50 votes to pass. That’s a hurdle that we can clear, but it comes at a cost. Any provisions of legislation passed during budget reconciliation are subject to a point of order (the Byrd Rule) if “they do not produce a change in outlays or revenues, or they produce changes in outlays or revenue which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.”

In other words, under the reconciliation proces, during the debate over the Health Care bill the Republicans can move to strike all sorts of peripheral elements of the bill if they cannot be shown to have some non-incidental impact on the budget. Depending on interpretation, this could apply to wellness programs (which are hard to score budgetarily), or any number of other important provisions.

The result could be a very pared down version of the bill. It might have less pork in it, but it could also lose vital (but theoretical) cost-savings provisions that will come back to haunt us later. Another feature of the reconciliation process is that legislation passed under the process faces an automatic five-year sunset (like Bush’s tax cuts) and therefore can be killed off later if the makeup of Congress flips sides.

On the other hand, the Democrats could pass a bill under regular order that has the support of all 60 Democrats. The difficulty with that is in getting the most centrist members to support a bill that is acceptable to mainstream Democrats in the House and Senate. And, those centrists don’t like to vote for anything that doesn’t have at least a vote worth of bipartisan support. Voting with the Democrats on a party-line vote as well-publicized at the Health Care bill leaves them feeling alone and exposed.

Beyond that, a few of these folks are basically ideological-Republicans. They oppose the bill for many of the same reasons the Republicans do. They’re corporate whores who deplore government action in the private sector. So, get ready for reconciliation. Baucus had his chance.