Nancy Pelosi's New Plan

After President Obama's light-on-details nod in his State of the Union to passing health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said unequivocally today that Congress will pass health care reform this year.

She also described a process in which smaller reforms will be moved through Congress quickly while the House and Senate continue to negotiate differences between their two health reform bills. She will announce the smaller fixes as soon as Democrats have decided which ones to pull out of the major reform bills.

"We're moving on many fronts, any front we have," she said. "If we go through the gate and the gate's closed, we'll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole vault in. If that doesn't work we'll parachute in. We're going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

The strategy of passing smaller pieces of legislation has emerged as negotiations between the House and Senate have become bogged down in fights over who will pay for reform and the framework for a new health care marketplace. Less controversial issues have become captive to winning approval for the overall bill.

The addition of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate will make the difficult process of winning 60 votes for the combined bill even more dicey, but Pelosi said she will continue to try to pass incremental reforms as well as the overall health care package.

"We must pass health care reform because the problem is still there," she said. "Our deficits in our economy are huge. We cannot sustain financially the current system."

Despite her insistence that comprehensive reform will pass, she said the House is not prepared to accept the Senate bill as it is. "We're not talking about minor tweaks," she said, "We talking about something more serious than that."

She also stressed that while the bills are alike, combining them is much more difficult than the president has indicated in saying the measures are 90 percent alike. "Maybe he knows something I don't know?"

In his speech last night, Obama said that he is committed to pass reform this year, but failed to give a road map as to how that could happen, or say what compromises he would accept to pass a bill.