Reading between the lines of several developments today, you can be pretty assured that the House will hold a final health care vote at the end of next week, possibly over the weekend.

President Obama delayed his trip to Indonesia from March 18 to March 21, leaving those three days open in case he needed to be available to work on passage. In addition, Steny Hoyer just announced on the House floor that there would be “possible action” on health care next week, with votes extending into the weekend. Nancy Pelosi said today that she’s waiting on CBO scores, which would start the clock for a process of committee markups and rule-setting that could last a full week. The CBO score on reconciliation fixes could come as early as today.

As for the public option, the hot potato has been passed back to the House. Dick Durbin said in a letter to the PCCC that the Senate would whip aggressively for whatever the House sent over in a reconciliation bill without any changes or amendments (this may be wishful thinking, since something is likely to change from the House reconciliation version). Essentially, Durbin punted the public option issue over to Nancy Pelosi. And Pelosi basically said today that there wouldn’t be a public option in the House bill:

“I’m not having the Senate which didn’t have a public option in its bill put any of that on our doorstep,” she said. “We had it, we wanted it, it didn’t have it, it’s not in the reconciliation. but it has nothing to do with whether we initiated here. we did initiate it. they didn’t.”

Basically, it’s dead and nobody wants to take the blame for killing it. Some progressive groups are trying to whip the House on it, but it seems like a difficult lift, considering all the other problems with the whip count already. Alan Grayson’s Public Option Act seems like a liklier vehicle than shoehorning a public option into this bill (it would also provide one at Medicare rates and with Medicare’s provider network).

That looks like the state of play. I’ll have a new whip count later on today.