Senate Finance Committee Approves Healthcare Bill with Just One GOP Vote

The legislative nightmare that is healthcare reform in America took a step closer to ending happily yesterday. The Senate Finance Committee passed a pretty lame bill on a vote of 14-9, with Maine's Olympia Snowe being the only Republican to back the legislation. While the bill will move to the left as it gets closer to the president's desk, the whinging of the right illustrates that they are not interested in fixing healthcare but rather in defeating the Democrats and especially President Obama.

Ms. Snowe in stating her decision to back the bill said that the vote she cast today was for today only. She reserved the right to vote "no" on any future version of the bill. Since a public option is most likely to wind up in the final draft, the Democrats may as well resign themselves to going it alone. Indeed, having bent over backward to include Republican ideas, the Democrats must eventually admit that they can't do anything to get Republican support.

That is a shame because some of the Republican ideas that have entered the debate are pretty good. Malpractice tort reform is one of the more obvious causes that deserves consideration. Less defensive medicine can only help the practice of real medicine. Another excellent GOP idea is allowing interstate purchases of insurance. Currently, there are around 1,800 health insurers in America and Californians have access to six of them. Making those six compete against the others would drive down prices.

That said, others on the right outside the Republican Caucus have been more than disingenuous. American Health Insurance Plans, a body claiming to represent 1,300 of the insurers, paid PriceWaterhouseCooper to write a report that looked at some of the proposed changes -- but not all of them. The firm was instructed to ignore places where savings would be made. Naturally, this report came out right before the vote as a scare tactic, arguing that if the bill passed, insurance costs would rise $4,000 per family per year. The accountants went so far, though, as to admit the study was flawed and even "bogus."

From here on, the resistance to healthcare reform will be fighting a rearguard action. The Democrats have the votes in the House and the Senate to pass a bill with a strong public insurance option. The 60 votes required for ending filibusters in the Senate are there. They need only 50 votes to pass the bill (Vice President Biden will break the tie), and if some Democrats need to vote "no" to keep their seats, there's no reason for them not to vote to end a filibuster. Indeed, it serves their needs to get an up-or-down vote to show their opposition.

There are two real mistakes that the Democrats have made in this process. The less important of the two was to think the Republicans could succumb to reason. More significantly, but less obvious, is the foolish composition of the Senate Finance Committee. It's no secret that many of the Democrats on that committee are more conservative than the rest of the Democratic Caucus. The next time the progressive wing of the party wins a landslide, they need to pack the Finance Committee. After all, financing is where good ideas fall apart, unless their backers have some say over funding.

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home