WHAT IF THE SENATE SHOULD PASS A HEALTH CARE BILL?

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a health care bill and sent it to the Senate.  The Senate has been massaging this bill and voted today on a procedural vote to consider a bill.*

Among the variants to be considered by the Senate is:
The chamber could then field some version of the replacement plan that stalled out recently, which may also fail. After that may come a vote for a partial, "skinny" repeal that would eliminate the individual mandate penalty, the employer mandate penalty and the medical device tax, according to NBC.    These mandates and device tax were made in an attempt by Democrats to pay for the ACA.   Republicans hate to pay for health care.  Reagan got a law that Emergency Rooms in hospitals must take all comers, and he left it up to the hospitals to find a way to pay for this.  George W. Bush (Bush-43) got Medicare D passed on prescription drugs, but also didn't pay for it so any deficit went "on the cuff."  It as no surprise that Republicans don't want to pay for the ACA.

 If the Senate passes a health care bill, it will be different from the House bill in important places so it gets sent back to the House to vote on it.  If the House doesn't pass the Senate Bill, the bill will go to a Conference Committee, presumably to resolve differences between the two Houses.

Here the fun can start because anything, absolutely anything, can happen to resolving the disputes, including letting the the bill "die in committee,"**  something not unusual even if the bills passed both houses by large margins.  Usually the Conference Committee "splits the difference" in some way between the two house bills, though I know of one case where the Conference Committee voted to increase the budget of a Bureau above what either the House or Senate bills provided.  At any rate, what comes out of the Conference Committee can be quite different from either the House or Senate bills.

If the Conference Committee comes to a conclusion and forms a revised bill, it then goes back to the houses for a vote where a member of the first house to consider the bill can recommend it go back to Conference Committee.  Also a member of the Senate can move to stricken some item from the Conference Committee bill, but 60 Senators can wave the rule.  In my experience, the House and the Senate usually vote to approve the Conference Committee bill.**

Don't hold your breath waiting for a  health bill.

* http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/25/sen-rand-paul-plans-to-support-republican-obamacare-vote.html
** https://www.thoughtco.com/how-bills-become-laws-3322300
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_conference_committee