Senate Health Care Bill DOA! House Listening To Voters

Dems Health Care Talks Collapsing



Health care reform teetered on the brink of collapse Thursday as House and Senate leaders struggled to coalesce around a strategy to rescue the plan, in the face of growing pessimism among lawmakers that the president’s top priority can survive.

The legislative landscape was filled with obstacles: House Democrats won’t pass the Senate bill. Senate Democrats don’t want to start from scratch just to appease the House. And the White House still isn’t telling Congress how to fix the problem.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) both tried to put a good face on the obvious chaos on Thursday, promising to press on.

“We have to get a bill passed,” Pelosi told reporters. “We know that.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said, “No way is it dead, because it’s so important for the country. And we will find a way to pass [it].”

But for the first time in the yearlong push, Democratic aides — and even some members — finally acknowledged privately that the fear of failure was real. And Congress recessed for the weekend without an obvious path forward as rank-and-file Democrats started splintering in different directions.

Democrats struggled all year to maintain a coalition in support of health care reform without any GOP votes. Republican Scott Brown’s improbable win in Massachusetts on Tuesday now looks like it has the potential to end that almost-impossible balancing act.

This post-Massachusetts confusion raises the stakes for President Barack Obama’s first official State of the Union address next week, which some now believe must be a last-ditch effort to get health care finished.

On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a fierce proponent of health reform, said it wasn’t clear how the Senate should press ahead.

“Obviously, you cannot just proceed as if nothing happened, because something very significant happened,” Schumer said, referring to Brown’s victory. “There is a strong view in both caucuses that we want to do some good things in health care, and the question is how? How much and how quickly?”

Pelosi took one option off the table Thursday when she told reporters that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill unless it undergoes major changes. The White House had hoped to avoid a protracted health care fight by getting the House to adopt the Senate bill, despite deep misgivings among House Democrats.

That leaves two main options for moving forward:

The first would be to pass a scaled-back health care bill, but it remains to be seen what that would look like. Liberal groups have already assailed the idea for falling short of the president’s initial goal of near-universal coverage. And the second idea is for the House to pass a so-called corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate legislation but would require the Senate to pass the second bill as well.

Schumer would not say which option he preferred.

“There are obviously different options, and you have to look at each,” Schumer said. “How long will each one take? I don’t think we want to do health care the next three months. So there are tradeoffs here, and that’s what everybody is exploring.”

And other options seem to keep popping up all the time. During a closed-door session at the Capitol Visitor Center, a number of House Democrats told their leaders to pursue a third path that would involve breaking the bills into separate parts and moving them one at a time — a tactic that presents obvious practical and political concerns.

In the absence of clear directives from congressional leaders or the White House, Democrats started pointing fingers and freelancing their own ideas.

An undercurrent to the unresolved negotiations is the mounting friction between the House and the Senate. The two chambers don’t see eye to eye on most days, but since the stunning Democratic loss in Massachusetts, the tensions have been exacerbated at a time when their trust and cooperation is essential to finishing health care.

Part of the negotiations center on whether Reid can provide an ironclad guarantee that the Senate will not leave the House in the lurch, aides said. If the House agrees to pass the Senate bill with a companion measure — or a “cleanup” bill — to make fixes, they want to know that the Senate will indeed pass it, too.

There was some talk among Senate leadership on Thursday of putting together a letter signed by 51 Democratic senators pledging to pass a cleanup bill if the House would pass the Senate bill. But that effort fizzled when support for it didn’t materialize, insiders said.

“The Senate moderates’ viewpoint is, ‘We passed our bill. We’re not going to spend three weeks on some other bill,’” said a Democratic lobbyist who represents clients pushing for reform.

“There’s a real possibility it doesn’t get through,” said another Democratic lobbyist.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said one possibility involved having the Senate pass the cleanup bill first. But there’s a question as to whether the Senate can amend a bill that is not yet law, officials said. Reid would also want some assurances ahead of time from the parliamentarian that key elements of the cleanup bill would not be struck from the bill, officials said.

House Democrats are angry with the Senate for passing a bill that divided their base, angering labor unions with a tax on expensive health plans and progressives by abandoning the public option. House members are frustrated that the Senate assumes they will roll over whenever the upper chamber demands it and that they took until late December to pass a bill.

Rank-and-file Democrats would like more guidance from the White House, but some complained when rumors broke that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was prodding lawmakers to move quickly to repackage a scaled-back bill. A White House source said Emanuel was just surveying members to see what they could accept.

Some Democrats also worried that voters would judge them out-of-touch for devoting so much energy to health care now.

“People think we’re not doing enough on the economy, we’re not doing enough on jobs, we’re not doing enough on employment, and perhaps we’re doing too much on healthcare,” said New York Rep. Eliot Engel, an outspoken backer of reform.

“Right now, their priority is jobs and the economy,” he continued. “Health care is not the priority. If we look like…we’re hell-bent on making health care the no. 1 priority regardless of how much pain is out there, then I think we do it at our own peril.”

Frustration among House Democrats was clear in a Thursday morning caucus meeting, members present said afterward.

Massachusetts Rep. Mike Capuano kicked things off by telling colleagues that health care reform wasn’t the only reason Democrat Martha Coakley, who beat him in the primary, lost the general election. Capuano said his party failed to explain to voters what the legislation means for average Americans, saying they should never have passed a 2,000-page bill.

“The health care bill is too complicated, and it looks like too many backroom deals,” Capuano said in an interview with POLITICO. “We need to do a much better job explaining what we are trying to do.”

Mississippi Rep. Gene Taylor got up after Capuano and said Congress should do a bill a week and have a pep rally, according to people present at the meeting.

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle told fellow Democrats that people in his district support insurance reform but hate the gamesmanship in this debate, citing Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson’s deal to shield his state from future changes to Medicaid and taxing benefits.

“They hate the devious stuff,” Doyle said. “They hate when we do something slick.”

The Senate, meanwhile, can’t understand why the House doesn’t acknowledge that the bill it passed is the best it can do.

“I have to respectfully say to the House, they’ve done some good work, but I just think that the bill that we end up with is going have to be more along the lines of what the Senate did,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Democrats also were also critical of an idea to scale down the bill to include popular provisions saying that all reform’s parts are interdependent. For instance, banning insurance companies from denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions requires that all people be required to carry insurance, which necessitates subsidies to help people afford insurance. And subsidies require tax increases or other revenue raisers to pay for them. Doing any of those things in isolation will drive up health care costs, they argue.

“Health care isn’t an incremental problem and there is no incremental solution that will work,” said Jacki Schechner, a spokeswoman for the progressive coalition Health Care for America Now.

She said there’s “a frustration with the lack of appreciation for just how much we’ve got. We’ve got the majority. We’ve got the bill. We’ve got the urgent need. We need to keep moving forward.”

To make matters worse, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, once a possible Republican vote, signaled Thursday that she was unlikely to rejoin negotiations with the White House and Democratic leaders unless they scaled back their ambitions.

Despite the dimming prospects, Senate Democrats on both ends of the political spectrum said they wanted to see the bill passed.

“We have to have it. We have to get the bill,” said Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). Not doing it “would be a disaster. It would be a disaster for my state. It would be an economic disaster. Talk about jobs; that’s the only growing sector in the economy. It just would be awful.”


Sources: Politico, MSNBC, TPMTV, Youtube, Vodpod