Should House Dems trust Senate Dems on health care?

Washington Post:

As Republicans work to prevent a health-care bill from reaching President Obama, they are scrambling to exploit divisions between Democrats in the House and Senate.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned House Democrats that they would be taking a colossal risk if they approve the Senate's version of health-care legislation before the Senate had acted to remove some of the bill's most contentious provisions. Now that Democrats have lost their Senate supermajority, some variation of this delicate two-step process is the only way a health-care bill can become law.

"House Democrats will have to decide whether they want to trust the Senate to fix their political problems," McConnell said. He listed a series of perks that Senate Democrats won for Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida and labor unions that House members are insisting be removed through a separate "fixes" bill under special budget reconciliation rules.

Moving the bill under reconciliation is appealing to Democrats because such legislation cannot be filibustered, although they are highly vulnerable to parliamentary challenges. The sequence in which the Senate bill and the package of fixes would move remains one of the key unresolved issues, much to the consternation of many undecided House Democrats. They would prefer to pass the reconciliation bill first and force the Senate to accept their fixes before the House approves the Senate bill.

But reconciliation rules seem to indicate that the House will have to pass the Senate bill first. Depending on how the Senate parliamentarian rules, Obama may even have to sign the legislation into law before the Senate can consider the House fixes.

"They will be voting, when they pass the Senate bill, to endorse the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gator-aid, the closed-door deal, the special deal for the unions, which may or may not bother any Democrats, I don't know," said McConnell. "But it will be riddled with special deals, and as we've all indicated, we think it will be the biggest issue this fall if they're somehow able to get enough Democrats to buy into this."

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) raised the House Democrats' worst-case scenario: that the House would hurry to pass the Senate bill by the March 18 White House deadline, only to watch the fixes stall in the Senate -- leaving House Democrats on the record supporting the side deals.

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What I don't understand is if the House passes the Senate bill as is, what is their to reconcile between the two versions? The term reconciliation implies working out a difference between two budget bills which suggest the two bodies agreeing on things in much the same way they would in a conference committee. What makes it so hard in this case is the "conference committee" is made up of all the members of both houses. The rules appear to be convoluted enough to make your hair hurt.