Democratic Health Care Deals Far From Sealed
Progress Meets New Hurdles
Roll Call Staff
Congressional Democrats steered their landmark health care overhaul back from the brink Wednesday by notching breakthroughs in both chambers, but the package still faces a long and bumpy ride to passage.
House leaders who have struggled for weeks to bring fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats on board announced a deal paving the way to get the bill through the Energy and Commerce Committee, but not to the floor, before the August break. But the agreement ran into a firestorm of resistance from liberal Members, forcing Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) to postpone plans for a markup Wednesday afternoon.
Waxman later reached an agreement with members of his committee and announced he would go ahead with the markup Thursday morning.
Waxman’s deal with four Energy and Commerce Blue Dogs, backed by House leaders and the White House, cuts more than $100 billion from the bill, prevents a new public option from using Medicare rates to reimburse providers and exempts small businesses with payrolls of less than $500,000 from a new employer mandate, among other changes.
The weakening of the public insurance option incensed some liberal Members, with Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairwoman Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) declaring she would vote against the bill.
More resistance came from within the Blue Dog Coalition itself, with some in the 52-member bloc saying the plan still costs too much.
The jarring and chaotic progress was mirrored on the Senate side, where moments after Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) touted a new score from the Congressional Budget Office for a bipartisan package he is crafting, Republicans on his panel declared the deal was far from done.
Bill Clark/Roll Call
Fiscally conservative Blue Dog Reps. Baron Hill (left) and Mike Ross helped craft a deal with Democratic leaders on a health care package, but the agreement incited a backlash from liberal Members who vowed to oppose it.
And not unlike Waxman, Baucus has his own troubles with committee Democrats who continue to be unhappy with the direction of his bipartisan talks. Baucus has led a group of six Finance Committee negotiators — three Democrats and three Republicans — to craft a consensus.
“This bill needs to work for the average American, and I’m not sure we’re there yet,” said Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who just last week got into a heated back-and-forth with Baucus and fellow Democratic negotiator Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.) on the direction of the talks.
Baucus told reporters that the deal he is putting together had received a CBO score of $900 billion over 10 years. The CBO said the bill would insure 95 percent of all Americans by 2015, be deficit-neutral and actually reduce the deficit by several billion dollars in the 10th year.
But Rockefeller indicated that the score Baucus got Tuesday night was inconsequential if the policy prescriptions aren’t right.
“It doesn’t make a difference to me,” Rockefeller said of the score, which was released without accompanying documents showing the details of what Senate Finance negotiators are considering.
House Democratic leaders were working furiously late Wednesday to salvage their health care deal. Waxman said he still hoped to at least get a bill through Energy and Commerce before adjourning for the break, a scaled-back victory given that they originally hoped the full House would pass a bill by the recess.
Leaders of the Progressive Caucus indicated they would rally their ranks to bring down any package that hewed too closely to the moderate Blue Dog compromise. “We have not only concerns but outright opposition” to some of the provisions in that deal, said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), a co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus.
The weakening of the public insurance option in particular incensed liberals.
“It has to be much stronger to get our support,” Woolsey said after a meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who tried in a meeting Wednesday to sell them on the deal.
Woolsey said progressives fear that without basing health care reimbursements on Medicare rates, the public option will not be able to hold down costs and force savings from private insurance companies. She said that was “great for the insurance companies” and would allow them to keep doing business as usual.
Members of the Progressive Caucus and the TriCaucus — the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus — were meeting at press time to discuss what to do next.
It was not immediately clear how deep opposition ran among liberals, as some sounded hopeful about steering the package back to the left as House Democrats merge three bills over the August recess.
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