Healthcare reform on Capitol Hill is all about spending control at this point. The fiscal conservatives – most importantly the blue dog Democrats – are reluctant to support a bill that would seriously increase our future deficits. As observed by an article on Slate, the House bill that has already passed three congressional committees can cut its own costs from $1 trillion over ten years (as estimated by the CBO) to roughly $239 billion over ten years – a manageable 23 billion a year.

But there is a serious problem with how this low number is achieved. According to a Newsweek article by Howard Fineman:

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told me that there are “curve-bending” provisions scattered through the three bills, but that those provisions need to be consolidated into a final bill for the whole thing to work. Here’s another political problem: most of Gibbs’s so-far-unaccounted-for curve-bending would be derived not from additional cuts in spending, but from raising taxes to generate revenue.

Those are our italics, by the way, but the point is that raising taxes on the rich is a course of action with serious political pushback from Republicans. It also helps to characterize President Obama as a ‘tax and spend’ Democrat, which is particularly embarrassing for the blue dogs that he desperately needs to win over right now.

As of this point, seriously considering the complexity of this issue, it is very unlikely reform will be achieved by August – or by the end of the year, as Obama suggested yesterday (though his address today did not include any such timetable). If you’re looking to play the Obama stocks in the near future, you should put your money into other sectors.