Campaigne for America’s Future
By Bill Scher
July 9, 2009 – 10:29am ET
Search For Revenue May Affect Health Care Timing
Politico Pulse reports: “Both the House and Senate may delay their summer breaks by a few days in order to get health-care bills off the floor. A House leadership aide: ‘If we need to, we’ll go longer.’ Ditto from a Senate leadership aide. The House’s ‘Summer District Work Period’ is scheduled to begin Monday, Aug. 3, and House leaders are hoping to have their final vote Friday, July 31, or – worst case – on Saturday. The Senate was already scheduled to be in D.C. a week longer: Senators’ “State Work Period” is scheduled to begin Aug. 10. The point of expressing flexibility on getaway day is to show leaders are still determined to get the bills done on President Obama’s schedule.
The Treatment’s Jonathan Cohn blames the disagreement over paying for reform: “On Wednesday, according to a Capitol Hill source, the Senate Finance Committee distributed to its members a list of about twenty ways to help pay for health care reform … It might sound like an ordinary and perfectly reasonable thing to do. And it would be–if this exercise were taking place, oh, six weeks ago. But it’s the second week of July. By this point, the Finance Committee was supposed to be holding hearings in order to ‘mark up’ legislation … Over on the House side, things are looking a good bit better.”
NYT update ends on optimistic note: “Mr. Conrad said Finance Committee members had left an afternoon meeting feeling optimistic after seeing some new cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. ‘We have a real range of options on financing,’ he said. ‘I think people walked out, feeling like, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’”
Senate HELP cmte markup (which doesn’t have jurisdiction on financing) on track. CQ: “HELP leaders hope to conclude their markup this week. They began debating the most controversial title of the bill Wednesday, a section that includes proposals to create new government agencies called ‘gateways’ to help people without insurance find subsidized coverage and to create a government-run insurance plan as one option available to the uninsured.”
OMB Director pushes Congress to squeeze more savings out of Medicare and Medicaid: “Orszag delivered a letter to lawmakers during a meeting last night on Capitol Hill amid signs that congressional momentum for overhauling the system is slowing. … Among other points, he urged lawmakers to include further cuts in the Medicare and Medicaid payments that hospitals receive for treating the uninsured.”
Time’s Karen Tumulty assesses meeting between Sen. Maj. Leader and group of GOPers: “Reid spokesman Jim Manley said his boss … told the Republicans that the time for posturing was over; it was now time, he stressed, to make it clear whether they intended to be part of the process of writing a bill, or simply opposing it. ‘The message was, ‘Are you in or are you out?’ Manley said. But where Reid may have thought he was drawing a line in the sand, GOP Senators took away the opposite message — saying they saw signs that the Majority Leader might be flexible on his deadline of passing a bill by the time Congress leaves town for its August recess.”
Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky analyzes the WH-hospital deal: “The savings are smaller than some progressives would have liked but they are real, perhaps even more so than the pharmaceutical industry’s recent pledge to lower (how, we’re not yet exactly sure) spending on prescription drugs by $80 billion. As the industry itself has admitted the savings are there for health care reform. Combined with additional savings from health care modernization and the additional revenue from an employer mandate, vice taxes, and possible changes to the tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance, the resources for reform are at at least $1.2 trillion. Most importantly, this agreement keeps the hospitals in line and supportive of reform. “
