Senate Reform Bill Faces Tweaks Amid Presidential Push
A rapidly dwindling pre-holiday calendar and increasingly direct pressure from the White House has the Senate working feverishly towards a health care compromise that can secure 60 votes and score Democrats and President Obama a major victory before the new year.
The president made a Sunday visit to Capitol Hill for closed-door meetings with Senate Democrats that was billed as a pep talk to recharge reform efforts that have stalled since last month’s vote to continue debate on the Senate bill. The White House said the president made it clear to his former colleagues that passing reform legislation was a “historic opportunity” that could not be wasted, part of a more forceful lobbying effort from President Obama himself and White House officials aimed at keeping the creaky process of forming compromise legislation moving quickly on a thin political timetable.
One new development that could pave the way for progress on a reform bill is news of a potential deal that would strip the Senate legislation of a true government-run “public option” and instead implement a less ambitious plan to cover the uninsured through preexisting government programs.
It’s the most overt sign yet that Senate Dems are worried about getting 60 votes and are ready to negotiate away key items on the wishlists of liberals in order to lock up moderate votes.
Senate Democrats in search of a health reform compromise Sunday zeroed in on a new alternative to a government-run insurance plan — signaling that the chances a final bill will include a pure public option are diminishing.
The new idea — for the government to create a national health insurance plan similar to the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan — seemed to gather momentum as the weekend went on, and the differences between liberals and moderates on the public option became even clearer.
The proposal would take the place of a new government insurance plan currently included in the Senate version of the bill, according to officials involved with the negotiations.
The plan would be administered by the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal plan for members of Congress, and all of the insurance options would be not -for-profit ones offered by private companies.
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“The proposal under consideration can be said to provide access to the same type of insurance plans that members of Congress and federal employees get. People think of that as government health insurance; progressives could portray this in the same vein,” said a Democratic Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations. “But moderates can simultaneously point to the fact that the government isn’t the payer and say competition was enhanced without growing the government.”
While moderates may be on board, it remains to be seen whether liberals in the Senate or the House could support the elimination of the public option after months of rancorous debate that ultimately led to its inclusion in both versions of reform legislation.
More palatable to liberals could be the inclusion of a “trigger” public option, a provision still being discussed and one that is seen as attractive to the White House and Senate Democrats as it has long been championed by moderate Republican Olympia Snowe. Some combination of the two is emerging as the leading conventional wisdom as to what a final Senate bill will look like.
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The alternative for a public option is the least worse of the worst. A new public option serves no purpose unless of course you believe that the real problem in health care is insurance premiums and ignore the underlying problem of health care costs.
Sad to say there is not one thing in the legislation that benefits those hundreds of millions of Americans who already have coverage in terms of controlling costs or improving quality. Read the bill and you will see that everything related to the 111 initiatives to do pilot studies, comparative effectiveness and the like relates to Medicare and then only ten or more years in the future, if ever.
http://quinnscommentary.com/2009/12/08/the-new-health-care-play-dough/