There has been chatter this past month about getting health care legislation to the President's desk before the state of the union adress by bypassing a formal House - Senate conference committee, and Jon Cohn says he has the "EXCLUSIVE: Dems 'Almost Certain' to Bypass Conference", but there's not really that much info there, so go ahead and skip that link for now and go past the break...

continued...

According to a pair of senior Capitol Hill staffers, one from each chamber, House and Senate Democrats are “almost certain” to negotiate informally rather than convene a formal conference committee. Doing so would allow Democrats to avoid a series of procedural steps--not least among them, a series of special motions in the Senate, each requiring a vote with full debate--that Republicans could use to stall deliberations, just as they did in November and December...
“I think the Republicans have made our decision for us," the Senate staffer says. "It’s time for a little ping-pong.”

“Ping pong” is a reference to one way the House and Senate could proceed. With ping-ponging, the chambers send legislation back and forth to one another until they finally have an agreed-upon version of the bill. But even ping-ponging can take different forms and some people use the term generically to refer to any informal negotiations.

David Waldman at Congressmatters has gory details (to correct one, it's 3962, not 3692) of potential scenarios of how conference negotiations would play out if taken that route (and a fun link to explain how the Senate gets away with circumventing the Constitution in order to write funding provisions in the first place, when "all bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives," but for now let's skip to the end of what is at that link because

it seems much more likely at this point that the bicameral leadership will opt for an even simpler process.

There's no formal requirement that the differences between the houses be settled in a conference committee. That's just one vehicle available to them, and one that comports with their preference for formal and transparent process. But there's nothing that prohibits them from meeting informally and trying to cobble together a package of amendments that they think can pass both houses, and then taking that package to the floor of the House and offering it as an amendment to H.R. 3590 as amended by the Senate. If they've calculated correctly, that package would pass the House and be sent back to the Senate, which would have an opportunity to vote on whether or not to accede to the House amendment. And if the House amendment has been pre-cleared in the informal negotiations, then Senate leaders will know that they'll have the 60 votes it would take even to overcome any threatened filibuster of the motion to take up the House amendment, which would all but seal the deal

And, just in case Ryan Grim's Dec. 7 reporting of the pong wasn't wrong:

"I've started hearing about it in the last week or so," said Jim Kessler, head of the group Third Way. Kessler, a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), is working closely on health care negotiations and said he's heard talk of the ping-pong plan coming from the Hill.

"You would need pre-conference negotiations. That pre-conference negotiation would be what ends up in the manager's amendment," he said. "Essentially, the manager's amendment becomes the new conference."

here's that manager's amendment (PDF here) and a summary of it from thehill.com in case you don't want to read all 383 pages