Politics

Previewing the Health Care Summit

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

We’re now just six days away from the big bipartisan, live-on-the-TV health care summit that President Obama will hold next week with leaders from Congress. Here’s a quick update on where things stand.

A New Reconciliation Bill

Obama is planning to release a new version of the health care bill — a sort of reconciled version incorporating elements tom the different bills passed by the Senate and the House — ahead of the meeting.

“Democratic officials said the president?s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate,” the New York Times reports. “The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.”

The bill will be available online on Monday morning, three days ahead of the summit, for members of COngress and the public to review, according to the AP. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the Times that the new bill will ?’take some of the best ideas’ from the House and the Senate and ‘put them into a framework’? for moving forward with finishing health care reform.

According to Politico, President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid are fully prepared to go the budget reconciliation after next week’s summit, barring any breakthrough on passing a bill with Republicans. “Right now, Democratic leaders are considering a $200 billion reconciliation bill that includes more affordability subsidies, the union-tweaked Cadillac tax and filling in the gap in seniors? drug coverage, which would be paid for primarily by additional Medicare cuts and an increase in Medicare payroll taxes above those in the Senate bill,” a Democratic insider told Politico.

The message from White House to GOP: We’re ready and willing to hear your ideas, but if you are not willing to work with us, on a health care bill, we have a workable plan to skip you and pass one anyways.

A Public Option Comeback?

In just three days, 18 Senate Democrats, including one member of the leadership, have singed onto a letter from Sen. Michael Bennet [D, CO] asking for the public option to be put back into any bill that is taken up under budget reconciliation rules.

“There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach ? its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option,” the letter states.

But is this a real resurgence for the public option, or just a chance for progressive Democrats to score political points? Eighteen senators — or even the 20 that Open Left is counting — is still a long way off form the 51 votes it takes to pass a reconciliation bill. And the politics of supporting the public option at this stage are an easy win-win for progressives.

But Ezra Klein sees some real meat behind the resurgence of public option support. “Adding the public option into the legislation would give them something to fight for, and something to be excited about,” he writes. “That matters. If you believe, as most people do, that midterm elections are largely about base mobilization, and that Scott Brown’s victory was in part assured by demoralized Democrats who didn’t feel much affection for either Martha Coakley or the Democrats in Washington, this may be the party’s last, best hope to give its passionate supporters the win that would reinvigorate them for 2010.”

Even the White House may be signing onto the letter.

The Republicans

It doesn’t look like the Republicans will be engaging with the Democrats’ bill at the summit, and there seems to be almost no hope for a bipartisan breakthrough.

Right now they’re asking: if the Democrats are coming to the summit with a bill in hand, what’s the point of asking them to participate?

“A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper,” House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner [R, OH-8] said in a statement. “We now know that instead of starting the ‘bipartisan’ health care ‘summit’ on Feb. 25 with a clean sheet of paper, the president and his party intend to arrive with a new bill written behind closed doors exclusively by Democrats— a backroom deal that will transform one-sixth of our nation’s economy and affect every family and small business in America.”

Their “kill-the-bill” stance hasn’t diminished. The Republicans still are not interested in adding their ideas to the current health care reform proposal. They say they want to start over with building a new bill, but what would be different next time? The political support and policy vision in Congress seems to be just very close to where to the balance of provisions in the current bill.

Still, there is no indication as of yet that they will choose to not participate in the summit.

Full post as published by Open Congress on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).