Senator Nelson (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Senate took up healthcare reform again today, and faces a triple threat involving questions about abortion, a government-run "public option," and the price that many consumers worry that they'll be forced to pay for their insurance. And the inflammatory rhetoric by the Democratic Senate floor leader is not likely to facilitate their already difficult task of obtaining the sixty votes necessary for cloture.
Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), as promised, introduced an amendment, patterned after the one written by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI-1), designed to ensure that no part of any health-care legislation allows public monies to pay for abortion services. In reply, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) denounced the proposal, saying that it would forbid a woman to obtain "abortion coverage" even with her own money.
Senator Lieberman
(AP Photo/CBS Face the Nation, Karin Cooper)
Senator Nelson has already stated that he will vote against cloture if an adequate prohibition against taxpayer funding of abortion is not present. Whether Senator McCaskill would vote against the bill if such a prohibition were present was not clear today.
Concerning an "option" for government-run health insurance, the earlier proposal by which the government would lend money to start a not-for-profit non-governmental foundation was not mentioned today. Instead, the current compromise idea appears to be the establishment of a plan modeled on the existing Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. The federal Office of Personnel Management would take direct responsibility for managing such a plan. How this would effectively differ from the government-run plan as stated in the bill is far from clear. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) said that the proposal interested her, but left unclear whether she was fully satisfied with it. Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) has already said that he would never vote for any form of the "public option," because, he says, several Democrats (whom he will not name) have whispered to him that the "public option" is a means by which to force the country to inaugurate a single-payer plan later on.
Senator Reid (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The price that individuals and families would have to pay has become an increasingly serious and divisive concern. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that individuals who bought their own insurance might have to pay 10 to 15 percent more for coverage, for various reasons. Then on Thursday, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association released an independent actuarial analysis showing that total claims, five years from today, would be 54 percent greater than they are today. (In reply, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid, D-NV, said that insurers were now willing to "say anything" to "deceive the public.") And yesterday, The Boston Globe released its own analysis detailing the concerns of many consumer advocates that health insurance premiums under the Senate bill might still be more than many consumers could afford to pay. The Globe analysis contained several projected premium figures for individuals and families at various income levels.
Lastly, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) took great exception to the rhetoric used by Reid on the floor of the Senate, in which he compared health-care reform opponents to apologists for slavery and opponents of women's suffrage. In an interview with Fox News, Hatch further expressed his doubts that Snowe or any other Republican would vote with the Democrats, who, he says, have produced "a lousy bill" and have not negotiated in good faith, nor made any serious attempt to garner Republican support until now.
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