Actual benefits of health care reform, by year (opens in new tab)

Interesting. I wonder why the democrats didn't think of this right away? Everyone was saying the bill was dead when that republican senator got elected right?

Was this procedure hard to figure out?

The rules for reconciliation say that the changes must only be financial in nature, ie, if you decided to subsidize all boat builders it would make sense for reconciliation to change the amount of the subsidy. But not add some new program for elephant trainers. That would be out of bounds.

The reason reconciliation was set up was so that the financial numbers could be tweaked with minimum fuss on bills whose policies were already voted for by the Senate.

What's in the bill right now is pretty much set in stone -- the reconciliation process is just the process of merging the current house version with the previously passed version in the senate. The house doesn't trust the senate, so they set it up as an "all or nothing" reconciliation process -- so it's not going to change.