WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic leaders, scrambling for the 60 votes they need to pass a health care overhaul, moved Monday to strike a proposal for expanding Medicare and to proceed without a new government insurance program.
“It’s a matter of getting 60 senators,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., told reporters after an evening meeting of the Democratic caucus at the Capitol.
Liberals seem resigned
Even several leading liberal lawmakers appeared resigned to the collapse of their dream of including either a new “public option” or an expansion of the existing Medicare program that would allow Americans between ages 55 and 64 to buy into the popular government insurance plan.
“There’s enough good in this bill that even without those two, we’ve got to move it,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who succeeded the late Sen. Edward Kennedy as chairman of the Senate health committee. “It’s a giant step forward — changing the paradigm of health care in America.”
President Barack Obama, pressing for Senate action on the bill by Christmas, plans to host an unusual meeting today with the entire Democratic caucus at the White House to build more momentum behind the legislative push.
Waiting on the cost
Senators and senior Democratic aides stressed that the issue would not be settled before lawmakers received a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office about the cost of proposed changes to the health care bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is trying to placate lawmakers who have concerns about other issues, such as the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.
Reid pledged on the Senate floor to assure that the final bill would close the “doughnut hole,” a gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage that forces many seniors to pay thousands of dollars out-of- pocket for needed drugs.
The current Senate bill does not include such a provision, but it is in the legislation passed by the House.
Democrats moved toward the new compromise after a tense day of strategizing and negotiation on Capitol Hill. Administration officials and senior Democrats focused on trying to diffuse a threatened filibuster from Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and several other centrist lawmakers.
Lieberman encouraged
Lieberman angered many Democrats over the weekend when he said he would vote against the bill if it included the Medicare provision. Lieberman met with Reid as well as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, deputy chief of staff Jim Messina and Nancy Ann DeParle, head of the White House Office of Health Reform. He told them that the core of the bill was fine, but that he couldn’t support it with provisions that he said would drive up federal spending.
He sounded upbeat about backing the legislation after Monday night’s caucus.
“Put me down as encouraged in the direction these discussions are going,” he said, disputing accusations that he has made himself a barrier to passing the legislation. “I don’t feel like a spoiler. I feel like someone who has wanted to be for health care reform.”
