Heileman on Healthcare (Good Analysis Buried Inside Barf Alert Article)

New York Magazine ^ | 12/22/09 | John Heileman

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-snip- ...begin by considering the narrowness of the vote by which the House passed its version of the bill in November: 220–215. ... on January 3, Florida Democratic congressman Bob Wexler will resign — and ...Republican Joseph Cao, the one GOP member who voted for the House bill, has reportedly said he won’t be the deciding vote... That means the effective baseline Pelosi is working with is 218–216. .-snip-

60 representatives stated they would not support a health-care bill (like the Senate’s) with no public option; 41 pledged to vote against any bill “that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law” (as the House bill did with the inclusion of the Stupak amendment and the Senate’s arguably does with its softer Ben Nelson–approved language); 188 stated their opposition to taxing high-cost employer-provided “Cadillac” health-care packages (as the Senate bill does).

"there are several dozen members who signed three letters saying they were ‘no’ if caddy plan or Stupak were in [the bill] or the P.O. was out.”

But now, the consensus among swing senators — including Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Kent Conrad — is that any significant movement ...would unravel the series of deals and compromises that Reid needed to employ to get to 60.

...the pro-choice forces, which aren’t much happier with the Nelson language in the Senate bill than they were with the Stupak amendment. On the other, there are Stupak and ten other pro-life Democrats who voted for the House bill but earlier wrote a letter to Pelosi saying they "cannot support any health care reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan" — which the Senate bill does not. Last weekend, Stupak deemed the Nelson language “unacceptable.”

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Original article is a two-bag barfer; while wringing his hands over whether or not the final bill will pass he accidentally gives us a little hope