What's good for the goose...Former Senate parliamentarian says reconciliation could be used to shred Obamacare

What reconciliation giveth, reconciliation can taketh away.

Since the national health care law passed in March, many have assumed that in order to repeal it, Republicans would have to gain a 60-seat majority in the Senate (on top of winning back the House and the presidency).

But in a phone interview with TAS, Robert Dove, the former Senate parliamentarian, agreed that the major spending provisions of the health care law could be repealed through the reconciliation process with a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate.

“If you eliminated something that was going to spend money, yes, that is in the order under reconciliation,” he said, when asked if the Medicaid expansion and subsidies for the purchase of insurance could be repealed using the parliamentary tactic that Democrats employed to help get ObamaCare across the finish line.

The insurance coverage provisions, which go into full effect in 2014, are projected to cost $921 billion in the first six years alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This accounts for the bulk of the spending in the legislation.

However, before conservatives get too excited, Dove cautions that there are “certain caveats.” While the rules of reconciliation would allow Republicans to eliminate spending in the health care law, they could not use the procedure to eliminate the tax increases – even if the overall reconciliation bill still reduced the deficit on a net basis.

“It’s a provision by provision situation,” Dove said. “So every provision in the bill must reduce the deficit.”

The same would be true to any attempt to scale back the Medicare cuts.

“Anything that reduces the deficit is okay,” he said. “And nothing that increases the deficit is okay. It’s just that simple.”

Republicans would not be able to touch the new regulations, get rid of the insurance exchanges, or strike down the mandate through reconciliation, either. But stripping the major insurance coverage provisions could help unravel the rest of the law. Without the subsidies, the insurance exchanges would be narrow in scope and it would be harder to justify forcing lower-income Americans to purchase government-approved insurance policies.

This doesn’t get into the political dynamics, most importantly, whether Republicans would actually be willing, in the face of Democrats’ demagoguery, to use the reconciliation maneuver to eliminate subsidies. But the point is, reconciliation is one option among several others that is available to drastically scale back the health care law.

NRO simplifies a complex, evil proposal to let government decide who will live and who will die

...if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public’s wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.

The fate of Obamacre therefore now rests not in the Senate but in the House. It is members of the House who must decide if it will be enacted, and it needs to be clear to voters exactly where their opposition to the Democrats’ approach to health care should be focused now.

Obama's "malignant narcissism" is on full display

The hardest thing in psychiatry is to keep an open mind while sitting with a patient, who might be trying to provoke and manipulate the doctor, day after day, month after month. We want to understand troubled people, but people are complex. Psychiatric diagnoses are just reasonable guesses. Most human beings are much too mixed, much too complicated, and much too interesting to reduce to just a checklist.

Obama is the exception. Lots of people talk like narcissists -- when teenagers get grandiose, or when they start to lie to and manipulate their parents, it might be just a phase they're going through.

Lots of people preen and strut on life's stage without losing their sense of proportion. But I think Obama just turned all his grandiose talk into irrevocable action. I don't think we've had this extreme and radical a president ever before in American history. Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR took radical actions, but only at a time of huge national crises. We don't have a national crisis today. Obama is our national crisis.

Obama is going for the "nuclear option" to force very bad and very toxic medicine down our throats. He is willing to sacrifice his congressional majorities to get the biggest, most budget-busting entitlement ever imagined into the permanent fabric of American national life. The main beneficiaries of Obamacare will be Obama's ego and the Permanent Left. This is his chance to be FDR, and he can't control his need for that glorified image. He is therefore crossing the Rubicon -- making an irreversible decision that will define his presidency forever, win or lose. This is not just another grandiose gesture. Obama now stands revealed for what he is.

Banking chair Kent Conrad: Reconciliation (simple majority) can't be used to pass Obamacare

On Face the Nation, Senate Banking Committee Chair Kent Conrad said, "Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform.

It won't work. It won't work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation. It was designed for deficit reduction... The major package of health care reform cannot move through the reconciliation process.

It will not work... It will not work because of the Byrd rule which says anything that doesn't score for budget purposes has to be eliminated. That would eliminate all the delivery system reform, all the insurance market reform, all of those things the experts tell us are really the most important parts of this bill.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care."