"...the bill the House would have to approve first would still include all of the egregious deals struck with individual Senators to buy their votes for passage in December. The special Medicaid arrangement for Nebraska. The exemption of Florida seniors from the Medicare Advantage cuts. The $300 million for Louisiana. Those, and many others, are all in the Senate-passed bill that Speaker Pelosi will be trying to sell in coming days.
Of course, the Speaker will tell these members, don’t worry, the reconciliation bill will fix all these problems. But will it?
If anything, what the president is now pushing, and will presumably push again tomorrow, would make the Senate bill even more expensive, by upping the premium subsidies, closing the Medicare “donut hole,” and giving all states the same deal as Nebraska. These added costs would be paid for with an entirely new Medicare payroll tax, applied toinvestment earnings. In other words, just days after voting for a highly controversial, trillion-dollar health-care bill, House Democrats would be asked to vote for a reconciliation bill that taxes and spends even more. And then that measure would go to the Senate, where there are never any guarantees that something will emerge unscathed."
IOW, nothing in the Senate bill can be changed by the House -- it's an up or down vote on the Senate bill, and they'll have to pray that the Senate makes acceptable changes through a hinky reconciliation process. It's already been decided that Stupak's abortion amendment can't be added through reconciliation, so instead the Dems simply say that the Senate bill doesn't fund abortions, and the media will pass along the lie.
That's absolutely right, the House can't change a single comma in the original Senate bill. But, there's a school of thought that says - despite what NRO explains - the House has to pass the original Senate bill first. There's the possibility that the House and the Senate could pass the Reconciliation bill, then the House passes the original Senate bill. From Roll Call, just yesterday...
"“We could pass the reconciliation first, have the reconciliation passed by the Senate and then pass the Senate bill,” Hoyer said. From there, he said, the president would have to sign the Senate bill first and then the reconciliation package."
My personal opinion is if they go off the cliff, this is the cliff that they'll choose.