Greg Sargent hears that Democratic Senate staffers "involved in planning health care reform are starting to mull an interesting solution: Paying for reform as part of the big economic stimulus package that the lame-duck Congress is debating."

The staffers even suggested that the advocates — a who's who of influentials from the labor and lobbying community — go out and try to sell the idea preliminarily to the public.

"The Kennedy staff really liked the idea," the participant says. "They said, `Go out and make that popular.'"

The general idea — again, this is very preliminary — is that a stimulus package of $300 billion or more, which is being suggested in some quarters, would be very hard to spend. So around $150 billion of it could go to health care reform, perhaps in the form of a big tax credit to employers covering employees for the first time, among other things.

Participants discussed health care reform as an economic stimulus but NOT as part of an economic stimulus package. There was no suggestion that anyone go out and make anything popular, and in fact, there was nothing in today's conversation that could even have been interpreted as such.