RSS
Home
Sixty swing votes could doom heath care reform
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Every Congressman has one item at the top of his or her agenda – getting reelected every other year. Agenda item A may be the thing that stops health care reform in its tracks this weekend.
Sixty Congressmen have decided that one or the other of the two most peripheral, and most controversial, issues respecting passage of the House health care reform measure could torpedo next year’s reelection prospects, and therefore 60 votes hang in the balance of last second language revisions regarding, of all things, abortion and illegal immigration. The eve of a House floor vote on health care reform is also shattering the granite monolith of the American Medical Association, which just this week said it endorses the House measure, along with AARP. Those endorsements, House Democratic leaders had hoped, would put the legislation over the top with the 218 Congressman whose votes they need to pass the bill. Instead, a firestorm of controversy now swirls around AMA delegates just arriving in Houston for a policy meeting.
Forty Democratic votes could be on the line over the abortion language in the House bill, though the final version of that language remains in flux with just one day to go before the vote. Speaker Pelosi had wished for a last minute boost from the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the bill’s current abortion language, but that wish was not to be granted. Their Eminences responded that they will oppose the bill unless leaders permit a vote on an amendment to strengthen protection for the unborn, meaning a prohibition against any health insurance policy paid for in the smallest measure by federal subsidies providing coverage for abortion services. Besides peeling off a huge number of pro-choice Congressmen from the vote count, such a strict anti-abortion clause would never pass the Senate, and so could kill health reform altogether.
On the other hand, not allowing a vote on the amendment will cost Speaker Pelosi 40 pro-life votes on the bill.
Then there are the 20 members of the House Hispanic Caucus, who are refusing to support provisions already in the Senate legislation prohibiting illegal aliens from buying health coverage on federally supported exchanges, even without any taxpayer subsidy of the premiums. New York Representative Nydia Velazquez and her caucus met with President Obama at the White House today, but received no indication President Obama, who supports the Senate version of restrictions on illegal alien participation in health reform, was willing to budge.
With the vote still shy of the required 218 this evening, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has suggested that the vote, scheduled for 5 p.m. Saturday, may not actually take place until Sunday, or early next week.
In Houston, the AMA’s endorsement of the House measure has lit a very hot flame under Georgia Medical Association’s Executive Director David Cook, who is signing up arriving delegates to support a resolution withdrawing AMA’s support for the bill. Cook’s proposal has already won support from state medical societies in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C, as well as the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and The American Society of General Surgeons. It’s now very clear to House members that a great many doctors do not, in fact, support this bill.
For one thing, the House bill does not address the 21% pay cut in store for doctors who care for Medicare patients coming next year. Steny Hoyer says the House will vote the week of November 16 on a separate bill designed to permanently fix the Medicare physician payment issue, but how can you ask doctors facing loss of over a fifth of their pay to buy a pig in a poke?
The rush to legislate before year end on health care reform has even brought an old TV character back from the dead. Actor John Ratzenberger, who played mailman Cliff Claven on Cheers, describes the late vote counting nightmare facing House Democrats in this way: “These people that are trying to force this healthcare bill upon us are not the philosophical descendants of John Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. They’re the philosophical descendants of Abbie Hoffman, Saul Alinsky and Wavy Gravy. These are Woodstock Democrats.”
