But as with so much in politics, especially when it comes to Senate procedure, things are not nearly so simple. In fact, if Reid did try using reconciliation, he could end up having to remove key parts of the legislation, not to mention hurting his party politically and losing an extra couple of votes in the Senate -- and, having done all that, he might well find out that he still needed 60 votes in order to get a public option approved.

Reid has ruled out the idea for now, saying last week, "I'm not using reconciliation." And other senators, like Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, agree with their leader, believing the procedure would end up doing more harm than good. An aide to a senior Democrat, who asked for anonymity in order to discuss the issue more freely, told Salon, "This isn't like a two-week delay, or a three-week delay. This fundamentally changes what we have promised to the American people, and it's risky, and I'm not talking about a little bit of fucking risk, I'm talking about a lot of risk ... It puts universal coverage at risk ... [and] risks allowing insurance companies to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions."

And of those pushing for the use of reconciliation, the aide concluded, "A bunch of people that watched 'Schoolhouse Rock' growing up think that they understand how the Senate works, and they don’t."

The problem is that budget reconciliation isn't really supposed to be used to make policy. Instead, as the Congressional Research Service's Robert Keith said in a 2008 report, reconciliation "is a procedure ... by which Congress implements budget resolution policies affecting mainly permanent spending and revenue programs." In the procedure's early years, however, it was used to circumvent the filibuster on provisions unrelated to that purpose. So in the 1980s, then-Minority Leader Robert Byrd led the Senate in a crackdown. What resulted was the Byrd Rule, which prohibits the Senate "from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill."

The definition of "extraneous matter" is fairly broad, and subject to interpretation -- during the Bush administration, Republicans passed tax cuts using reconciliation -- but it generally includes any provision that fails one of these six criteria, as listed in Keith's CRS report:

• it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
• it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions;
• it is outside of the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
• it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision;
• it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond the "budget window" covered by the reconciliation measure; and
• it recommends changes in Social Security

Even if a provision violates one of these rules, it won't automatically be stricken from a bill. In order for that to happen, a senator has to take action, generally by raising a point of order. Then, the chair (the majority leader or a designee) rules on whether to sustain that point of order and remove the offending part of the bill. That may seem like an easy victory in the making -- Reid rules that the public option passes the Byrd Rule's tests, and that's that -- but that's not necessarily the case.

Liberals argue that the public option could survive the Byrd Rule, pointing to tax cuts that Republicans passed using reconciliation during the Bush administration as precedent, and arguing that the public option would pass the tests anyway because it would theoretically decrease the federal deficit.

They may have a point, but it doesn't much matter -- the only thing that does is the opinion of Alan Frumin, the Senate parliamentarian. Technically, Reid isn't required to abide by Frumin's judgment, but according to Robert Dove, who served twice as Senate parliamentarian, he will anyway. "It's not that they have to [listen to the parliamentarian]," Dove told Salon, "but absolutely they do ... The past history is that the view of the parliamentarian becomes the ruling of the chair."

If Reid did rule the public option out of order under the Byrd Rule, the whole point of using reconciliation would be rendered moot. The only way to overturn the chair's ruling in such a case would be with a three-fifths vote of the Senate -- that is, with the same 60 votes the majority leader would need to round up in order to defeat a filibuster. In that eventuality, there's no way Reid could get the supermajority; Lieberman would certainly abandon him, and moderate Democrats might too. Plus, Byrd has already expressed his distaste for the idea of using reconciliation for health reform, and could be expected to vote to support the rule that bears his name.

Dove wouldn't speculate on what Frumin might decide, or give his own view on the matter, but aides from both parties have met with him, and Reid's office made "preliminary inquiries" about the public option, the aide to a senior Democrat told Salon. No one's offering much detail about what Frumin said, but the fact that Reid has taken reconciliation off the table could well have something to do with those meetings.

The public option might not be the only thing dropped from a bill that's pushed through the Senate using the procedure. Republicans would almost certainly object as often as possible to elements in the legislation, and they'd win many of those battles -- maybe even the war. "If you're a Republican, your job in reconciliation is to do two things: One, to put Democrats in an untenable position to have to vote for or against things that are going to bite them in the ass when they run for re-election; but more importantly, your thing is to find provisions where if you snip that out, it's going to bring down the entire bill," the aide to the senior Democrat said.

Ultimately, passing a reform bill with reconciliation is "feasible," Dove says, but the resulting legislation "would not be pretty, and it couldn't contain a lot of things that people want to be in it."

Time and again, we've written about how crisis pregnancy centers masquerade as legitimate healthcare facilities and target young, poor and minority women by offering free pregnancy tests and counseling. In reality, these centers, which are often staffed by unqualified volunteers, provide medical misinformation as a means of coercing women into going through with a pregnancy and, in some cases, to give the baby up for adoption (to a good Christian family, natch). Some clinics have been found to delay pregnancy test results so they can first subject patients to graphic anti-abortion imagery and propaganda.

This measure is bolstered by more than crisis pregnancy centers' well-established reputation nationwide: Last year, the NARAL Pro-Choice Fund sent staff members into 11 Maryland centers in particular to pose as potential patients and reported that "every CPC visited provided misleading or, in some cases completely false, information" about abortion and birth control." For good measure, the clinics also threw in "emotionally manipulative counseling" (for example, one worker told an investigator, "You need to come meet your baby before deciding what to do"). Worse yet, many clinics "purposefully schedule sonogram appointments two-three weeks after the initial appointment to ensure that there will be a heartbeat and that the pregnancy is larger than a grain of rice." (If you're short on outrage today, I highly recommend reading the report in its entirety.)

What makes these centers so pernicious is that they calculatedly project "an aura of medical authority," as the NARAL report puts it, when in reality they are largely "amateur-run." This measure aims to chip away at that facade. Frankly, the legislation could go much farther and actually require them to cop to the totality of their dishonesty -- these clinics should be happy they're getting off so easy.

On a related topic, in the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart has an interesting article exploring Lieberman's history and his current stance. Beinart asks why, given his record as a liberal on domestic policy, the senator's staking out the position he is, and has this answer:

For close to a decade, he got nearly perfect scores from the American Public Health Association, which backs a single-payer health-care system, and in lieu of that, the “public option.” Now, all of a sudden, he’s so outraged by a public option that he’s threatening to filibuster any bill that contains it. The arguments he makes on behalf of his new position are remarkably weak: He says the public option will raise costs, even though the Congressional Budget Office has said no such thing, and even though logic suggests that by competing with private insurers, a government plan will actually drive costs down. Some have accused Lieberman of shifting right in order to win backing from the insurance industry in preparation for a 2012 reelection run. But, in fact, he gets relatively little insurance money, and Connecticut politicos mostly think he won’t run.

So why is he doing this? Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

The telephone poll of 1,136 women suggests that the objection to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's guidelines arises from a mistrust of the panel's motivations. Seventy-six percent of women believe the decision was based on cost, not science. That's no surprise considering that the results were released amid a contentious debate about healthcare reform and that the recommendations have been poorly communicated to the public. As Cristine Russell writes in the Atlantic, the panel's intent may have been to deliver the message "that individualized, informed decision making should replace blanket guidelines for universal, routine mammography screening of women in their 40s" -- but it failed spectacularly on that front. 

No matter your personal take on the new mammogram guidelines, one thing is certain: There is a critical lack of information on the topic. The Gallup poll found that 40 percent of women believe that a 40-year-old woman has a 20 to 50 percent chance of developing cancer over the next decade, when her actual risk is only 1.4 percent. Clearly, we need to strike a better balance between effective awareness-raising -- like pink ribbon campaigns -- and communicating nuanced medical fact.

One member of the Senate's Democratic caucus, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., has already said he intends to support a filibuster if the bill includes a public option. And he's not the only one saying something like that -- Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska are also talking defection.

That means that unless Reid can work out some sort of deal, he'll need to look for votes elsewhere: specifically, across the aisle. The New York Times reported Monday that he's already done that; along with the White House, he's courting Maine's two senators, Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Both voted with their party on Saturday, but both have also shown signs that they're willing to defect for the right bill. Snowe, for instance, became the only Republican to have voted for any of the Democrats' proposals when she supported the Finance Committee's version of reform legislation.

And Collins is quoted in the Times as saying, "“I have ruled out voting for this bill, but I still very much want to vote for a bill and that is why I am continuing to have discussions. I still cling to the belief that it is possible for a group of us to come together and rewrite the bill in a way that would cause it to have greater support.”