Healthcare Open Thread

I read the news today, oh boy...

House may try to pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate's health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers "deem" the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic -- known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass" -- has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

"It's more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know," the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. "But I like it," she said, "because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill."

Republicans quickly condemned the strategy, framing it as an effort to avoid responsibility for passing the legislation, and some suggested that Pelosi's plan would be unconstitutional.

Which is debatable. And it's certainly not something about which the Republicans were very concerned on the many occasions they've used the procedure themselves.

That said, it's pretty obvious if the bill gets passed this way, its legitimacy is going to be questioned, fair or not, which is a fairly compelling disincentive against using it. Of course, getting healthcare reform passed is a fairly compelling incentive for using it. So.

Meanwhile, it just wouldn't be an important national political debate without some Republican somewhere throwing a totally inappropriate racist allegory into the mix:

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Monday used language that compared House Democrats' efforts to pass healthcare reform legislation to a Japanese kamikaze mission.

"Nancy Pelosi, I think, has got them all liquored up on sake and you know, they're making a suicide run here," Graham said on the Keven Cohen Show on WVOC radio in Columbia, S.C.

Yeesh.