Road Map: GOP Continues Attack On Health Bill’s Cost
Roll Call Staff
That leg the Democrats are standing on? It belongs to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), whose health care reform bill has finally given President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress something to crow about.
The Republicans are doing their best to amputate.
Finance is set to report Baucus’ bill out of committee today, and the leadership-led negotiations to merge the package with legislation previously approved by Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee should start immediately thereafter. But the next phase of political jockeying over health care reform had begun almost before the ink
was dry on the preliminary, deficit-neutral cost estimate of $829 billion over 10 years bestowed on the Baucus bill last week by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans moved to discredit the score as gimmicky, built on huge tax increases and just flat-out inaccurate, while Democrats — particularly those who were often the most frustrated with Baucus’ insistence on moving deliberately and crafting a deficit-neutral bill with GOP input — referred to it as a game-changer. This fight should carry over into this week, with its staying power highly dependent on whether the forthcoming merged floor bill receives a similar, political boost from the CBO.
“I think this was the biggest shot in the arm that Democrats got for health care in a very long time — very long time,” Senate Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said Thursday. “I think one of the major things Americans are looking for is, Is this bill in control — is it in control of cost? Does it add to the deficit? CBO gave a resounding Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on those grounds. That is going to help us immeasurably.”
Republicans, of course, are having none of this, arguing that the CBO score given to the Baucus bill changes nothing, partly because of its looming merger with the very expensive, very left-leaning HELP bill. The HELP legislation includes a very robust, national public insurance option; the Finance bill proposes much less costly, voluntary nonprofit medical cooperatives.
Additionally, Senate Budget ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) released documentation charging that the Finance legislation would be a free-spending deficit machine after it is fully implemented in 2014 — a theme that several GOP Senators have chosen to run with.
“In many ways, the score of the CBO on the Baucus bill is irrelevant,” National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) said. “I can understand the sort of popping champagne corks with the preliminary score on the conceptual language in the Baucus bill. But it’s only a piece of the story, and it really, I think in the long run, will be irrelevant to what we ultimately have to vote on.”
The Baucus bill is not a panacea for the Democrats, given their division over the public insurance option and the uncertainty of how the Finance-HELP merger will play out. Key Democrats, such as Sen. Chris Dodd (Conn.), who led the markup of the HELP bill, continue to insist that CBO scores aren’t everything — that a reform bill must be transformative, even if that means spending a little money.
But the Finance package has given Democrats some breathing room to make their case that they are on track to deliver health care reform that won’t break the bank — something they’ve been arguing for months with little supportive evidence to point to. Even some House Democrats have taken to touting the legislation.
And at least there is one Democratic bill out there that theoretically adheres to Obama’s demand that reform be deficit-neutral and not cost more than $1 trillion.
“The president has made it clear that we cannot add to the deficit in the name of reform,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. “The Finance bill as scored by the Congressional Budget Office not only meets the president’s target, it generates some $91 billion for the Social Security trust fund, which is very positive in terms of fiscal argument.”
Beginning in July and surging in August, Republicans’ political standing and push to defeat the Democrats’ health care agenda gained steam, particularly because of the CBO scores given to the health care reform bills drafted by HELP and three House committees. The public recoiled at the predictions of deficit spending and trillion-dollar-plus price tags, which led to doubts about other Democratic health care proposals, ultimately pushing voters into the ideological camp that the GOP has occupied from the outset of the reform debate.
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