by David Safier

Raúl Grijalva just put out a press release explaining his stance on health care reform now that it looks like the Senate won't be able to get 60 votes for a major bill. Grijalva's bottom line: don't pass the flawed Senate bill. Begin with a reconciliation bill that only needs 51 votes, followed by smaller bills with regulatory measures that have some support on both sides of the aisle.

I believe that a fix of the required magnitude could not pass both chambers of Congress in a timely fashion. Instead, I favor a two-part approach. Part one would be to pass a clean reconciliation bill requiring only 51 Senate votes that would include many important budget-related elements. This would not merely amend the Senate bill; it would pull the best budget-related items supported by the vast majority of American people from the existing reform bills and create a single transparent piece of legislation. Part two would be to send a separate handful of popular regulatory measures to the Senate, where they enjoy bipartisan support. These would include insurance cost controls, portability between jobs, ending the use of preexisting conditions to deny coverage, prohibiting lifetime and annual limits on benefits, prohibiting age and gender discrimination, establishing essential benefit standards, and ending the practice of rescission. This approach ensures that much of what we sought to achieve with health care reform will be enacted without the need to re-engage a debate on how to ‘fix’ the irredeemable Senate bill in the face of unrelenting Republican obstructionism.

Read the entire press release after the jump: