Senate Might Take Months on Health Care Reform
May 08--WASHINGTON -- It's been said that the United States Senate is the world's most deliberative body, the saucer that cools the hot coffee that's perpetually percolating in the House of Representatives.
It's been called different names in recent years: dysfunctional, hopelessly partisan, filled with people who think they'd be a better president than any current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue down the street.
Now, the Senate is about to be called another thing: More methodical shaper of American health care policy, which affects about one-sixth of the American economy.
With the House last week passing legislation to transform the Affordable Care Act into a Republican American Health Care Act -- in other words, a Republican remake of Obamacare -- the tables have already been set for a 2018 election fight no matter what the Senate does. Republican House members in swing congressional districts -- those that could go to one party or another in any given election -- will be asked to explain their vote on a bill that was passed without members knowing precisely its potential cost, or how many people it would affect.
Among those is Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, who voted for the legislation and immediately saw the non-partisan Cook Political report rate his congressional district as one of the top 20 that could shift toward a Democrat, as a result.
But all that is a separate story line from what will happen to the policy in the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a reputation as cool and calculating, and most importantly, a leader who does not act just to act.
As quickly and messily as the House slammed its bill through on a totally partisan four-vote margin, losing 34 Republicans along the way, the Senate is now set up for a more deliberative and, potentially, more collaborative rewrite of the whole thing. The process could take many months in the upper chamber. It's difficult to see any serious resolution before the Senate goes into recess for August.
Some senators want to start over and write their own bill. Some Republican senators, like Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio, have been highly critical of the bill passed by the House.
And some Republican senators, like Roy Blunt of Missouri, are suggesting that working with Democrats on a compromise rewrite is the logical way to go. Whether anything they'd come up with could get through a House with a majority fractured between moderate and conservative Republicans is, for now, the essential legislative question of 2017.
The reasons for that essentiality are numerous: First, what transpires in the Senate on health care will determine whether Republicans can fulfill a campaign promise, and do so without losing their majority in the House.
Second, other initiatives, most notably those to follow through on President Donald Trump's campaign promises to lower taxes and spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, are at least partly on the sidelines as this health care fight goes to the Senate.
And third, how the Senate negotiates its response to the House bill could very well be a template for how it proceeds on tax reform, infrastructure, and other big-ticket Trump campaign promises.
Blunt, on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, seized on a Democratic senator's assertion last week that Obamacare needed to be improved, either through the current law, or by repealing it and replacing it with something else. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who faces a potentially tough re-election fight himself, told Fox News that the law "needs to be improved. It hasn't been improved."
No Democrats in the House were as explicit in acknowledging that need as Tester was. But several prominent Senate Democrats, including Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have indicated they'd be willing to work on fixes on Obamacare.
Blunt, referring to Tester's statement, said: "Let's be sure we get people more access. Let's be sure we solve the problems of Obamacare ... . There's something dramatically wrong with the current system. I saw one of my Democrat colleagues this week said that this system isn't working, and he said, I'm maybe willing to be part of a repeal and replace strategy and we need to hear and see more of that."
On the web: Sen. Roy Blunt's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
By the numbers:
217-213 --Vote to approve U.S. House bill to replace and repeal Obamacare.
0 --Number of House Democrats who voted for the bill
They said it: "There were plenty of mistakes made with the (Affordable Care Act), there's no doubt about that. Quite frankly, we didn't make the modifications over the last six, seven years, for obvious reasons, to make that bill better." -- Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont, to FOX News.
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