Obama Will Move Forward With Reconciliation Next Week

The White House is sending the signals that they plan to pass Obamacare via reconciliation:

President Obama will make an announcement sometime next week on what he "believes is the best way forward" on health care reform, the White House said Friday.

"We've had many weeks to contemplate where we are," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The president will consider areas of common agreement discussed yesterday at the White House health care summit and work with his team to possibly incorporate them into the health care proposal he has put forward, Gibbs said. Some of those ideas could include Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.)'s suggestions on cutting fraud and abuse from Medicare.

"This is a fairly dynamic process that will happen over the next several days," Gibbs said.

It is unclear whether there are enough votes in either the House or the Senate to pass the president's health care proposal, but Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, will be working with both Democrats and Republicans to try make progress on the issue, Gibbs said.

If the Senate is unable to find any Republican votes for health care, they may use a process called "reconciliation," which only requires a simple majority, to pass the bill. While the proposal to use reconciliation has been characterized by some as too partisan, Gibbs said that "the notion that somehow health care hasn't been done this way has been offered up by people but is not accurate."

He pointed to COBRA (the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act), which gives workers who lose their health coverage limited extended benefits, as an example of health care legislation passed under reconciliation.

Obama will declare that he listened to the GOP, incorporated some of their ideas, but will go ahead with his vision of nationalized health care and will pass it through the Senate via reconciliation. It's hard to say at this point whether Harry Reid can get enough Senators to go along, and passage through the House may be all but impossible. However, if he makes the attempt to push it through this way the GOP better be prepared to go to war on this and every other issue that comes up.