Brian Beutler at TPM:
At a special evening meeting of the Democratic caucus tonight, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid outlined, in broad strokes, the details of his health care bill, which the CBO has found, in a preliminary analysis, will expand coverage to 94 percent of Americans while reducing the deficit. And earlier in the day, during a separate meeting about floor procedure, Reid let three of his party’s key skeptics know that if they join Republicans at any stage of the process to block the bill, he still retains the option of passing major parts of it through the filibuster proof budget reconciliation process.
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So what’s in it exactly? Tonight, Reid described some of the key controversial provisions to the full caucus.
The bill will include a public option with an opt-out clause for states, though the public option itself, and many other key provisions in the bill, including the exchanges and a Medicaid expansion wouldn’t be available until 2014–one year later than previous versions of the legislation, and the House bill call for. It also includes new language prohibiting federal funds from financing abortions–though the exact mechanism remains unclear.
“There is a strict wall between a woman’s private funds and federal funds,” said a supportive Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), one of the Senate’s leading pro-choice members.
Boxer could not elaborate about whether or not the bill would, like the House’s legislation, preclude people who receive federal insurance subsidies from buying health care plans that cover abortion, but Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), a pro-life Democrat, told TPMDC, “I think that’s certainly the intention.”
According to a number of senators, the language differs from both the Stupak amendment and the less restrictive Capps amendment. But though most details remain unclear, the public option would not be permitted to provide abortions, and insurance companies in every exchange in every state would be required to provide at least one plan that covers abortion, and one that does not. “There will be no public money spent on abortions…there will be a requirement in each state that they offer a plan, one without any abortion and one with so that you cover bases appropriately,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
As expected, Reid raised the floor on a controversial tax on high-end “Cadillac” health care plans, so that fewer policies with more luxurious coverage will be immediately impacted. At a baseline, insurance companies would pay a 40 percent tax on purchased plans that cost individuals $8,500, and $23,000 for families of four. To account for the lost revenue, Reid increased the Medicare payroll tax for high-income earners.
Under the terms of the bill, Medicaid would be expanded to cover everybody up to 133 percent of the poverty line. And in a move that will disappoint progressives, tax credits to buy health insurance would be limited to those between 133 and 300 percent of poverty line. (People between 300 and 400 percent of poverty would not be provided any direct federal assistance, but insurers would not be able to set their premiums at more than 9.8 percent of their annual income.)
And, to address one of Ben Nelson’s concerns, Reid stripped out a provision that would have overturned the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemptions.
As they trickled out of the meeting, Democrats sounded optimistic. “We’re going to pass this legislation,” Kerry said. “That means we’re going to get it to the floor, we’re going to debate it, we’re going to pass it.”
Another week, another “scoring” of a bill that (a) looks nothing like what it’ll look like in its final form and (b) almost certainly has been crafted to hide certain key costs (a la “doctor fix” in the House bill) to improve its “score.” Realistically, the only time a CBO score matters is when it’s bad: Were this to come in at over $900 billion or be judged a deficit-buster over the long term, it would be rejected for failing to meet the White House’s baseline demands. But this one just makes the cut, so look for the obligatory back-pat in this weekend’s presidential message about it being a “fine starting point” or an “encouraging beginning” or whatever. Reid managed to come up with a bill that isn’t too expensive … for Barack Obama. Congratulations.
I think the Senate leadership has good reason to not want to try to push health care reform through under the budget reconciliation process. But I also think it’s much easier to imagine a pretty good bill passing under standard procedure if it’s clear to Senators that the alternative to breaking a filibuster is reconciliation rather than no bill. That levels the bargaining position. Progressive members are being asked to support a bill that contains provisions they don’t necessarily like on the grounds that the overall package is better than the alternative. That needs to be a two-way street in which moderate members are, likewise, prepared to vote for a bill even if they don’t get there way on every single point. The prospect of reconciliation is the best way to motivate that choice.
So I was glad to read this:
In response to a question from TPMDC Nelson told reporters that, at a meeting this afternoon with Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Reid “talked about process, procedure, discussion about reconciliation and a whole host of issues of that sort.”
“Nobody’s really jumping up and down to push for reconciliation,” Nelson said, “he’s not threatening that, but anybody can conclude that if you don’t move something on to the floor, that is one of the possibilities.”
That’s right. Doing nothing should not be an option. If it’s not possible to achieve cloture, then the best thing to do is get the best bill you can get through the reconciliation process.
Peter Suderman at Reason:
After several days of delays, the Senate finally released its health care reform legislation and the official Congressional Budget Office score to go along with it. Despite promises that the bill and the score would be available around 5 p.m. this evening, the CBO’s full analysis wasn’t released until fairly late in the evening, leaving most reporters with nothing to report but the headline numbers put out early on by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Needless to say, those numbers are the numbers Reid is happiest to have people see: According to a handout prepared for reporters this evening, the bill would cost about $850 billion, cover 94 percent of the uninsured, reduce the deficit by $127 billion over 10 years, and reduce the deficit by a further $650 billion over the following decade. Since the CBO’s data-heavy 31-page report, which explains the assumptions behind those numbers, was released so late, those are the numbers that dominated the evening news, and they’re also the numbers that will make headlines in newspapers tomorrow morning.
Naturally, those reports won’t include any detailed analysis of the bill’s score. Nor will they include the any of the score’s caveats, such as the CBO’s caution that “the range of uncertainty surrounding that assessment [of the federal budgetary commitment to health care] is quite wide,” or its now-familiar warning that “these longer-term calculations assume that the provisions are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation.”
So whether it was by design or not, Harry Reid effectively won himself a news cycle by putting out the news he wanted people to see in advance of the substantive report.
Karen Tumulty at Swampland at Time
Philip Klein at American Spectator:
The Hill reports that Harry Reid has modified the language concerning taxpayer funding for abortion in the Senate bill, but that he has avoided the Stupak language that was essential to getting legislation approved in the House.
The article quotes Sen. Ben Nelson, who said that Reid assured him that his concerns about abortion financing would be addressed, but that he had not yet seen the modified language himself.
