Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
NPR documents that reconciliation has been used for decades to pass various health care reform measures. As usual, the Republicans are lying and claiming something is "unprecedented" when they've done that very thing themselves innumerable times.
But health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. "In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process," says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.
Here's the list from NPR:
A History Of ReconciliationFor 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:
1982 -- TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs
1986 -- COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care
1987 -- OBRA '87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program
1989 -- OBRA '89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care
1990 -- OBRA '90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid
1993 -- OBRA '93: created federal vaccine funding for all children
1996 -- Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare
1997 -- BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens' health program called CHIP
2005 -- DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid
Politics
Comments
Each minority party always yells and screams when the other uses reconciliation.
It's as predictable as the seasons, as is the GOP's highly selective memory and their equally gullible fans.
Posted by: CHV | March 5, 2010 12:23 PM
CHV,
Again, the problem isn't the hypocrisy, it's the extreme to which the GOP has descended. They are literally trying to block and obstruct everything, they've taken to rejecting their own legislation and own pet projects if the Democrats show any sign of supporting them, or agreeing with them. With this (and many other issues) they've gone beyond simply a selective memory issue down the road of outright fraud and deceit. They appear, at this time, to be quite willing to irreparably cripple the country for potential (not even actual) political gain.
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 12:48 PM
Imagine, someone who believes the world is 6000 years old actually omitting certain truths in the political processes too. When one has refined the technique of cherry picking only the data that will support your claim and trashing the rest, this kind of hypocrisy is not very surprising.
If you shove your head far enough up your ass you can warp reality to anything you wish it to be.
Blessed Atheist Bible Study @ http://blessedatheist.com/
Posted by: kKBundy | March 5, 2010 1:03 PM
So that's what it stands for! I never bothered to find out, even though I would have gone on it for several months a couple of years ago if it hadn't cost over $600/month for me (I worked for a company with great health insurance).
Isn't it ironic that name of one of the most well know pieces of legislation associated with health care legislation from the last 25 years actually has the words "Budget Reconciliation" in its title?
If the Democrats actually had a clue, I would have known about this weeks ago.
Posted by: tacitus | March 5, 2010 1:25 PM
Dogmeat @ 2:
I'm aware of what you wrote above, but the GOP's base seems to be loving their obstructionist mode so in their minds why should they stop?
Posted by: CHV | March 5, 2010 1:28 PM
CHV @ 5 said, I'm aware of what you wrote above, but the GOP's base seems to be loving their obstructionist mode so in their minds why should they stop?.
Because they're going to need votes from a lot more than their base to get elected.
Posted by: chezjake | March 5, 2010 2:02 PM
I see three major reasons:
1) It's bad for the country.
2) There is nothing to stop the Democrats from doing the same thing when the GOP is in power.
3) There aren't enough Republicans in the base for the party to be successful. If they continue to alienate the remaining 2/3 of the voter base, they'll never win a national election (IE 2012)
The entire activity is a formula for disaster, a tottering country in the middle of a recession and fighting two wars (kinda), and they're playing obstructionist politics in a method that is likely to alienate non-base voters (IE counter-productive and can lead to their political opponents using the same tactics against them (IE establish semi-permanent gridlock).
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 2:04 PM
I am shocked. Shocked. One party acts like the other used to when the majority changes.
Shocked I tell you.
Posted by: funny | March 5, 2010 2:36 PM
OK, I'm totally on board with the reconciliation process, I too think republicans are nutty obstructionists. But just because COBRA contains "Reconciliation" does not mean the same legislative process was used to pass it, does it? I've seen that list before, but I haven't heard if those pieces of legislation were passed through reconciliation to avoid filibustering or other blocking tactics. Some reconciliation measures are inoffensive and do not match this situation (given that the situation includes republicans lying and foaming about the mouthparts while their constituents nod sagely at the repetition of proven falsehoods.)
ice9
Posted by: ice9 | March 5, 2010 5:05 PM
What? The Democrats are using a procedure that will allow a majority of the chamber to pass a bill? Whoa. How will democracy survive?
Posted by: Chiroptera | March 5, 2010 5:12 PM
To be pedantic, if NPR just enumerated the times that reconciliation has been used, then it can't be "innumerable". :-)
Posted by: Scott | March 5, 2010 6:14 PM
@8
I love shallow analysis like this. It's the kind of thinking that lets the Republicans go to any kind of extreme, because if the Republicans do it now, then the Democrats must have done exactly the same thing when the circumstances were reversed.
Except they didn't.
When the Republicans pushed through the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, nobody on the Democratic side of the aisle pretended that budget reconciliation was an unprecedented evil.
"Centrist" bs like comment #8 is little more than a sign that the person in question hasn't been paying attention.
Posted by: RickD | March 5, 2010 6:25 PM
I could be wrong, but I believe the list provided by NPR is only the times reconciliation has been used in Health Care related legislation, at least that's how I read the article.
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 6:49 PM
I've been hearing reconciliation has been used a total of 22 times, 16 of those when Republicans were in the majority of the Senate.
One worthy notable is that only one of the health-care initiatives passed through reconciliation with the present parliamentarian officer. As best as I can determine, he's the gatekeeper with only two possible simple-majority alternatives if he rejects specific items. The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can fire him, which doesn't guarantee his replacement will play ball, or the President of the Senate, VP Joe Biden, can overrule him. I think the latter option is the more interesting remaining question regarding whether there's a precedent for previous VP's having done so.
Personally the only people paying attention to this stuff are most likely partisans who won't change their positions no matter what the Democrats decide to do. Therefore the Democrats should be playing hardball, a game which it appears they do not recognize except when playing amongst themselves.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 5, 2010 9:36 PM
Ed Brayton: ... they've done that very thing themselves innumerable times.
Michael Heath @ # 14: ... reconciliation has been used a total of 22 times...
For some of us, twenty-two is innumerable, even after we take off our shoes and pants.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | March 6, 2010 11:08 AM
Consolidated means it pulled pieces from several budget bills together, Omnibus meant it covered everything in the budget process, and "Budget Reconciliation" meant is was the budget reconciliation process--the same process they're planning to use this time around.
I don't like the budget reconciliation process for passing major legislation, because it's a way to avoid debate and to railroad something through by making the costs of voting against it too high (i.e., failing to pass a budget). It's incredibly crappy from both a process and a policy perspective. But that said, it's become (distressingly) common, so the wailing and gnashing of teeth is mere crocodile tears (and how's that for today's mixed metaphor?).
Posted by: James Hanley | March 6, 2010 11:10 AM
(I had tried to post a comment on Friday where I had spent a fair amount of time looking up information on the legislation the NPR report lists. The comment was 'held for moderation' and never posted, so I'll just summarize what I remember about what I found.)
If you look into the details of these bills, they were all very large pieces of legislation, many being the entire budget acts for the year. The health care related aspects must have been very small parts of them, because only in a couple of cases were those health care provisions even mentioned in the wiki articles about the bill. Another feature of these bills, if you look into the voting records, is that most passed with large, bi-partisan majorities, one even passing the Senate on a voice vote, where any one senator could have objected and required everyone to go on record. (The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act being an exception as it needed Cheney to break a tie.)
My conclusion, after that hour or so of research I did before, is that the Republicans are overblowing the 'unprecedented' angle of the reconciliation issue, but it is still obvious that passing a policy proposal through reconciliation, that would include many purely regulatory aspects rather than taxing and spending provisions, would be highly unusual, at the least. Ed, NPR's and your claim that these bills were 'health care reform measures' passed through reconciliation is not an accurate description of those bills, nor is it at all accurate to compare them to the current issue.
The best argument I can make against using reconciliation for the Senate bill comes from a sitting Democrat where he is actually defending it, somewhat. The senator is Sen. Byrd, of Byrd Rule fame. (Check the link for how reconciliation is supposed to work.) [Emphasis mine]
So, if the bill is legitimately structured to reduce deficits, then Sen. Byrd feels that it would be consistent with reconciliation rules. Since the likelihood of these proposals actually reducing the deficit are nil, I don't see how anyone can support reconciliation.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 7, 2010 9:32 AM