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The $100 million health care vote e-mail rumor - checking the facts
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Senator Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana
A new e-mail forward is quickly making the rounds claiming the senate health care bill includes what amounts to a bribe of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. This e-mail is essentially a copy and paste job from a report by ABC News' Jonathan Karl, Huma Khan, and Z. Byron Wolf. It charges that:
On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”
The section spends two pages defining which states would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”
ABC News has been told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill. . .
How much does it cost? According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.
So, is this e-mail forward true?
The complete text of the bill in question, H.R.3590, is available from OpenCongress.org. Section 2006 on page 432 of the bill does indeed include the quoted text.
In addition, the Congressional Budget Office released their analysis of the bill on November 18, 2009. Page 23 includes a table entitled "Estimate of Effects on Direct Spending and Revenues for Non-Coverage Provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act". This table reports that the section in question is anticipated to cost $0.1 billion (or $100 million) in the year 2011, and $0 for every other year from 2010 to 2019. This is the only reference to section 2006 and no further details are given about the method behind this determination.
The tricky part to this e-mail rumor is determining which states qualify. There are several pages of legalese laying out the specifics, most of which only further confuse the issue. The basics are that every county or parish in the state must have been declared a major disaster under section 401 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act.
The Corner quotes Landrieu's press secretary as saying, "It’s something she has been working on for a long time," apparently confirming that Louisiana would be covered. They also report that Sen. John McCain states, "If you look at what’s in that provision, you see the benefits those states (that are home to fence-sitting Democrats) will receive, especially Louisiana." McCain's comments seem to imply that there are other states that might qualify. Perhaps further clarification on the issue will be brought out during debate on the bill in the upcoming weeks... perhaps.
An interesting note, Landrieu herself apparently agrees with most of the e-mail. When responding to charges that her vote had been bought for $100 million, she told reporters, "It’s not $100 million, it’s $300 million, and I’m proud of it and will keep fighting for it."
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