OpenCongress.org also did some analysis of the measure, especially as compared to other legislation from the past 10 years. Turns out five of the ten longest bills in that period were written by Republicans.

In fact, while the House's healthcare reform proposal was the longest, a bill authored by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, was only 68 words behind. A 2005 appropriations bill sponsored by Rep. James Kolbe, R-Ariz., came in fourth at 296,111 words and one of the centerpieces of former President Bush's agenda, the No Child Left Behind Act, was sixth behind the strength of its 274,559 words. Minority Leader John Boehner, now spearheading the message that the Democrats' bills are too hefty, was the sponsor.

Unsurprisingly, then, being a deficit-hawk is back in vogue among Republicans. It’s been one of the GOP’s main lines of attack against, well, everything -- but particularly healthcare reform. One major policy debate, however, has managed to avoid any discussion of costs, even though the expenditures could total hundreds of billions of dollars, with little promise of return. That policy, of course, would be any escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

So Democrats who are skeptical of the war have started trying to play at the GOP’s game. Powerful House Democrats are speaking up in favor of some sort of new tax to defray the immense costs likely to be incurred in Afghanistan in coming years. The group includes Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who runs a crucial armed forces subcommittee and Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., the number-four guy in the Democratic caucus.

One of the ideas floating around is a graduated surtax on income, the size of which would depend on how much the war ends up costing. Says Frank, "It's conditional, but if we're going to add 40,000 troops, people ought to know what the costs are. It's important for people to understand how these wars are adding to our deficits."

As of now, the White House is staying neutral on this. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs points out that, as no decision has been announced about a broad policy approach for Afghanistan, there's no public proposal on how to pay either, though conversations are going on in private.

Still, some administration-watchers have taken note of the presence at the Afghanistan meetings of Peter Orzsag, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. When asked about Orszag's attendance, Gibbs explained simply, "Cost is a concern."

 

Public Option: Will states be allowed to “opt out”?

Both bills include the creation of a government-run insurance provider to compete with private insurers. However, the Senate version would allow states to opt out of the public plan.

Abortion: The Stupak Legacy

To garner much-needed support from anti-abortion Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) allowed them to attach the infamous Stupak-Pitts amendment to her chamber's version of the bill. The provision would bar women who are receiving federal subsidies for their insurance from purchasing plans that cover elective abortions. It would also bar the public plan from offering abortion coverage. The Senate version takes a more moderate approach: Those receiving federal subsidies could buy insurance that covers abortion -- but insurers would have to place federal money in separate accounts and could only use private dollars to cover the procedure. The public plan could also offer abortion coverage, as long as it segregated federal subsidies in the same way.

Cost: The difference a year makes

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the House bill would cost about $1.052 trillion and reduce the deficit by $138 billion. The CBO predicts that the Senate bill would cost $849 billion, while cutting $130 billion from the deficit. This difference is largely due to the fact that many major provisions in the Senate proposal would not go into effect until 2014 -- a year later than in the House bill.

Coverage: Universal? Not quite

For decades, the Democrats talked of providing universal healthcare. These bills come closer, but neither quite reaches that goal. Both, however, will significantly reduce the number of uninsured. Today, 83 percent of non-elderly legal residents have health insurance. (The elderly are covered by Medicare.) Under the House bill, 96 percent of that population would be covered by 2016. The Senate's legislation would expand coverage to 94 percent. Still, about 18 million people would remain uninsured under the House's proposal, as would about 23 million in the Senate's.

 

Paying the bills: What gets taxed

Under the House bill, much of the money to pay for the reforms would be raised through a 5.4 percent surtax on high-income people -- that is, individuals making more than $500,000 a year or couples with annual incomes in excess of $1 million. The Senate version, on the other hand, would impose a different series of new taxes including: A 40 percent tax on “Cadillac health plans” (employer-sponsored group plans with premiums of over $8,500 for individuals or over $23,000 for families); the introduction of annual fees for health care companies; an increase in Medicare payroll taxes from 1.45 percent to 1.95 percent for those earning more than $250,000 a year and the implementation of the so-called "Botox tax," which is a five percent tax on elective cosmetic medical procedures.

Employer mandates: Do companies need to offer health insurance?

The House bill stipulates that employers with payrolls of more than $500,000 must offer health coverage or pay a federal tax. The Senate version does not explicitly require employers to provide coverage; however, companies with 50 or more full-time employees would have to pay a penalty of $750 per employee if they fail to offer coverage and if any of their employees obtain federally subsidized care via the new health insurance exchanges.

Friday, Senate Democratic leaders agreed to include the Wyden amendment in their healthcare proposal. Under this provision, employers would have one of two options. Companies could offer their employees a single plan and give all eligible workers the option of accepting a voucher to independently purchase their own insurance. Alternatively, an employer could offer two or more health care plans, provided that at least one has a premium that costs no more than the average premium of the two least expensive health plans in the local exchange. The House bill includes no comparable language.

Individual mandates: Penalties for remaining uninsured

Both bills require most Americans to maintain a minimum level of health insurance. However, the penalties for not doing so are much stiffer in the House bill: Those who failed to acquire insurance would pay a tax equal to 2.5 percent of their gross income of over $9,350 for individuals or $18,700 for couples. Under Reid’s legislation, the penalties would start at $95 per person in 2014 and gradually go up to $750 a head in 2016.

Insurance Exchanges: State-based or national

Both bills would create some sort of health insurance exchange, a marketplace where individuals and small companies can shop for insurance and compare benefits and prices. The exchanges would put individuals into large risk pools, which are intended to provide them with leverage to purchase insurance at a lower cost. The House bill would create a national exchange, although states could petition to run their own exchanges as well. Under the Senate proposal, states would form their own exchanges. This, however, could prove problematic, as it is unclear whether state exchanges would be able to attract a sufficient number of enrollees to push for lower premiums.

Illegal Immigrants

The House bill would allow illegal immigrants to buy insurance from the exchanges, but would not allow them to obtain federal subsidies. The Senate version prohibits illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance from these exchanges, even if they could pay for their own coverage in full. This could have the effect of preventing illegal immigrants from buying individual insurance altogether.

In an unprecedented defeat for the Federal Reserve, an amendment to audit the multi-trillion dollar institution was approved by the House Finance Committee with an overwhelming and bipartisan 43-26 vote on Thursday afternoon despite harried last-minute lobbying from top Fed officials and the surprise opposition of Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had previously been a supporter.

Grim details how key Committee Democrats such as Frank -- who spent the year claiming to support an audit of the Fed in the face of rising anger over its secret and bank-subservient policies -- suddenly introduced their own amendment (sponsored by Democratic Rep. Melvin Watt) that would have essentially gutted the Paul/Grayson provisions.  Banking industry and Fed officials, as well as the Democratic leadership, then got behind that alternative provision as a means of pretending to support transparency while protecting the Fed from any genuine examination.  Notwithstanding the pressure exerted on Committee Democrats to support that watered-down "audit" bill, Grayson convinced 15 of his colleagues to join with Republicans to provide overwhelming support for the Paul/Grayson amendment.  As Grim notes:

[Frank] urged a no vote, yet 15 Democrats bucked him, voting with Paul.  Key to winning Democratic support was a letter posted early Thursday from labor leaders and progressive economists. The letter, organized by the liberal blog FireDogLake.com, called for a rejection of the Watt substitute and support for Paul.

Grayson was able to show Democratic colleagues that the liberal base was behind them.

"Today was Waterloo for Fed secrecy," a victorious Grayson said afterwards.

The bill still faces substantial hurdles in becoming law, of course, but yesterday's vote has made that outcome quite possible, and it's worth noting several important points highlighted by what happened here:

(1) Our leading media outlets are capable of understanding political debates only by stuffing them into melodramatic, trite and often distracting "right v. left" storylines.  While some debates fit comfortably into that framework, many do not.  Anger over the Wall Street bailouts, the control by the banking industry of Congress, and the impenetrable secrecy with which the Fed conducts itself resonates across the political spectrum, as the truly bipartisan and trans-ideological vote yesterday reflects.  Populist anger over elite-favoring economic policies has long been brewing on both the Right and Left (and in between), but neither political party can capitalize on it because they're both dependent upon and subservient to the same elite interests which benefit from those policies.

For that reason, many of the most consequential political conflicts are shaped far more by an "insider v. outsider" dichotomy than by a "GOP v. Democrat" or "Left v. Right" split.  The pillaging of America's economic security by financial elites, with the eager assistance of the government officials who they own and who serve them, is the prime example of such a conflict.   The political system as a whole -- both parties' leadership -- is owned and controlled by a handful of key industry interests, and anger over the fact is found across the political spectrum.  Yesterday's vote is a very rare example where the true nature of political power was expressed and the petty distractions and artificial fault lines overcome.

(2) As Grim expertly describes, the effort to defeat the Paul/Grayson amendment came from all of the typical Washington power centers using all of the establishment's typical manipulative tools:

The playbook in Washington often goes like this: When a measure that threatens the establishment builds enough momentum that it must be dealt with, it is labeled as "unserious." The Washington Post editorial board, true to the script, called Paul's measure "an unserious answer to a serious question."

And it particularly rankles the center that a pair of "wingnuts " [Paul and Grayson] are behind a successful effort to challenge the prevailing order.

Step Two is for a "serious" compromise to be offered. In this case, it was Watt's amendment. But by the time the vote was called Thursday afternoon, committee members had seen through his measure, recognizing that it was not a compromise effort to bring real transparency to the Fed but an attempt to further shut the doors.

One can count on one hand the number of times that establishment attacks like this fail, but this time -- at least for now -- it did.  And it reveals a winning formula:  where there is a strong and principled leader in Congress willing to defy the Party's leadership and the Washington establishment (Grayson), combined with leading experts lending their name to the effort (economists Dean Baker and James Galbraith), organizations standing behind it (labor groups), and a shrewd and driven organizer putting it all together (FDL's Jane Hamsher), even the most powerful forces and opinion-enforcers can be defeated, as they were here.  Those progressive advocates' refusal to be distracted by trite partisan considerations, and their reliance on substantial GOP support to pass the bill (as hypocritical as the GOP's position might have been), was particularly crucial -- and smart.

(3) Beyond the specifics, a genuine audit of the Fed would be a major blow to the way Washington typically works.  The Fed is one of those permanent power centers in this country that exert great power with very little accountability and almost no transparency (like much of the intelligence and defense community).  The power they exert has exploded within the last year as a result of the financial crisis, yet they continue to operate in a completely opaque manner and with virtually no limits.  Its officials have been trained to view their unfettered power as an innate entitlement, and they express contempt for any efforts to limit or even monitor what they do.  

In other words, the Fed is a typical Washington institution that operates un-democratically and in virtually total secrecy, and a Congressionally-mandated audit that they (and much of the DC establishment) desperately oppose would be a serious step towards changing the dynamic of how things function.  At the very least, it would provide an important template for defeating the interests which, in Washington, almost never lose.  At least yesterday, those interests did lose -- resoundingly -- and the importance of that should not be overlooked.

Cao is in a unique position, because he's a first-term congressman who represents a heavily Democratic district. As a result, he'll have a hard time getting reelected as it is, and though the GOP base would undoubtedly rise up against him, Cao can use a little bipartisan credibility with the Democrats in his district. The only reason he was able to win election in the virst place is because he was running against Rep. William Jefferson, who was under indictment on federal corruption charges at the time of the vote; Jefferson has since been convicted on a majority of the counts against him.

Update: Whether due to Emanuel's infamous gift for arm-twisting, his district's blueness or something else, the Democrats won over Cao. He crossed the aisle to provide the bill with its 220th "aye."