One reason Congressional leaders are elected is that they can competently count an upcoming vote. That skill stays with them and explains why they seldom bring major legislation to a vote without confidence that it will ultimately pass.
Given such precedents, the perils-of-Pauline press coverage that health reform proposals have been receiving leads to an obvious question - who doesn't get it, those producing the news or those consuming it? Reporters addicted to the dramatic return-from-death's-door formula see a recurring legislative roller coaster. From the inside, it feels more like an ocean liner moving relentlessly forward.
Today's prognosis is much brighter than the soap opera reported by the media. The fact that Sen. Reid is bringing a bill to the Senate is a signal that he believes the odds are good that he can get his colleagues to support similar legislation after debating it.
If that's true, the resulting conference will be more complex than contentious. Many of the differences between the bill approved by the House and the one on the Senate floor involve numbers (how many people should be covered how quickly, how much of a subsidy they should receive, how small employers should be to win exemption from new rules).
Straightforward questions like that are reasonably easy to resolve when they're not presented as moral issues that require the losing side to compromise its basic principles.
That process could be made easier yet if there was an acknowledgement that many of the features in this bill are an experiment that will be subjected to change once we see how they work. We don't know how many people will use insurance exchanges or how affordable the product they offer will be.
We don't know how employers or individuals required to buy insurance will respond.
Some challenge the wisdom of going forward and challenge the revenue estimates supporting the bill because of this uncertainty. They don't deserve to be taken seriously unless they explain how we can reliably predict the result of actions yet untaken. As Lyndon Johnson remarked during the creation of the Great Society, the government allows the people to test various options and decide which deserve to die, which demand revision and which few will ultimately be construed as legislative home runs.
The process today hasn't been perfect, but it has been pretty successful. One safe prediction is that the result won't be perfect either. One reasonable test is whether a system is created that better meets the needs of those now suffering because they can't afford the care they need. The new plan will pass that test.