Reconciliation: What is the Republican Strategy?

Senate Democrats have decided to take up budget reconciliation of the health bill to fix any last-minute errors and add necessary amends to the bill before it becomes law. For more information about what reconciliation involves and procedural details, please look here, but for now I would like to explore the Republican reconciliation strategy.

After losing, to put it bluntly, the healthcare debate, Republicans are now faced with a decision: to make worthwhile amends to a bill that they really have no chance of repealing and face criticism for supposedly "supporting" the bill, or reject all amends and blame Democrats for a lackluster bill, hoping that Americans will forget they didn't want healthcare in the first place. Right how, it's looking like they're leaning towards the latter, and that all Senate Republicans will appose the changes. Their top target to bring down is a list of changes to a proposed tax on high-cost employer-sponsored insurance policies. Obama had negotiated changes to the tax with the heads of organized labor, and successfully blocking the proposed changes could create a political "headache" for Obama.

A new strategy put forth by the Senate Republicans is to portray the changes desired by Senate Democrats as detrimental to the health bill. However, as the article states, "It was unclear that the argument would stick, given that many of the changes in the reconciliation measure are intended to adjust provisions the Republicans themselves had criticized."

But the question is, will these strategies work? Can the Republicans really succeed in portraying healthcare as a bad thing, and Democrats as the real "losers"? Politics is the game now, but when people's lives are saved and sick children suddenly receive care, I think the rules of the game will change drastically, and most likely not on the side of the Republican naysayers.