Frankly, I’m surprised they’re still in the bill now. Rightly or wrongly, it would be a perfectly reasonable assumption on the part of any Congressman who attended or watched the “town hall meetings” that the majority of the anger directed at the health care bill is directed at the proposed Medicare cuts and nothing else.
That’s why the “town hallers” didn’t really give me a good deal of hope. Judging by a lot of the questions and comments at those meetings, at least a sizeable minority of the opponents of this bill would have no problem with multi-trillion dollar deficits so long as their own benefits were safe.
I think one reason has to do with the Byrd Rules that control the Reconciliation Bill. It's complicated, and I'd have to read it again, but there's some language about certain provisions of revenue bills having to expire (if passed under Reconciliation) if they adversely affect the budget deficit after "x" number of years.
This is why we see sunset provisions in the Bush tax cuts (expiring this year). Those tax cuts were passed using Reconciliation. I think they had to leave those Medicare cuts in place, if they wanted to get Reconciliation through, without any sunset provisions being attached.