WASHINGTON – With Democrats increasingly confident they have enough support, the House of Representatives planned Saturday for a historic vote today that would enact the most dramatic changes in the nation’s health care system in decades.
As a sign of that confidence – and to quiet concerns among Democrats as well as Republicans – House leaders abandoned a plan to approve the Senate’s health care legislation without a direct vote.
President Barack Obama, in a politically charged visit to Capitol Hill, tried to rally support for the measure by telling the House’s 253 Democrats to ignore the gloom-and-doom midterm election scenarios that Republican leaders and pundits have suggested if they pass the health care measure.
“You’re here to represent your constituencies, and if you think your constituencies honestly shouldn’t be helped, you shouldn’t vote for this,” Obama said. “But if you agree the system’s not working for ordinary families … then help us fix this system.
“Don’t do it for me. Don’t do it for the Democratic Party. Do it for the American people.”
Before Obama’s arrival on the Hill, House leaders worked feverishly to round up the last undecided votes to reach the 216 needed for passage.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, was confident about today’s prospects, saying flatly, “We will pass the bill.”
The pace was furious and sometimes heated both inside and outside the Capitol, where thousands of tea party demonstrators gathered to protest the bill. Some demonstrators hurled racial and sexual insults at Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. Lewis, a noted civil rights leader, is black, and Frank is openly gay.
Inside the building, House Democratic leaders dropped a controversial plan that would have “deemed” Senate-approved health care legislation passed as part of a resolution setting rules of debate but would not have required House members to vote directly on the legislation.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Democrats abandoned “deem and pass” because the party leadership is confident that it can get the votes to pass the health care bill.
“We determined that we could do this and it’s a better process,” Hoyer said. “We believe we have the votes.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, hailed the decision as “a victory for the American people.” He vowed to force Democrats to stand up, one by one, to announce their votes for the Senate bill, which contains a number of politically fraught provisions.
“This is not over,” Boehner said, according to the Washington Post. “They do not have the votes yet. We’ve got to keep working to make sure that they never, ever, ever, ever get the votes to pass this bill.”
The maneuver had been seen as a way to allow Democrats to avoid voting on the bill, but Democrats were uneasy about the prospect.
Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., said it looked like a “back-door deal.”
“We’ve had sanity prevail here,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater, a supporter of the legislation. “This is something that should be done in the light of day.”
Hoyer said the House today would vote first on a bill that would change parts of the health care bill the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. Then, if that bill passes, the House will vote on the Senate health care bill.
The second vote would send the Senate bill to Obama to sign while the first bill would go to the Senate for a vote under reconciliation rules that prohibit a filibuster and would require only 51 votes for passage. The Democrats control 59 Senate seats.
Pelosi and others continued to meet with a handful of anti-abortion Democrats who have refused to support the bill. Several alternatives were proposed, including an executive order reiterating federal policy toward abortion would not change, or a separate vote to toughen abortion restrictions.
But a separate vote on abortion language will not happen today, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a leader of the abortion rights forces, said.
Meanwhile, House Democratic leaders hope to attract more nervous Democrats by showing them a letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and signed by more than 50 Democratic senators that says they’ll support the reconciliation bill.
The compromise package would spend $940 billion to extend coverage to 32 million Americans over the next decade, leaving only about 5 percent of non-elderly citizens without coverage, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Millions of people would be added to the rolls of Medicaid, the government health program for the poor, while millions more who lack access to affordable coverage through the workplace would receive federal tax credits to buy insurance.
For the first time, every American would be required to obtain coverage or face a penalty of at least $695 a year. Employers, too, would have a new responsibility: to offer coverage or face penalties of $2,000 per worker. By cutting more than $500 billion from Medicare over the next decade and raising taxes on the well-insured and high earners, the package would trim deficits by $138 billion over the next decade and by around $1.2 trillion in the decade thereafter, the CBO said.
The legislation would require most employers and consumers to obtain coverage by 2014 or face penalties. Families earning up to $88,000 a year would be eligible for help paying premiums. Consumers would be able to use new exchanges, or marketplaces, to easily shop for coverage.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years. It includes a series of tax increases, including higher Medicare payroll taxes on the wealthy and a new tax on dividend, interest and other unearned income.
The House considered its own version of a health care overhaul bill in November, and 219 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana, backed the bill. Cao has said he’s opposed this time, and at least two Democrats who voted yes, Reps. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Michael Arcuri, D-N.Y., are expected to switch to no.
Five Democrats who voted no say they will vote yes, but the margin for passage remains perilously thin, dependent on anti-abortion Democrats who voted yes in November to remain committed to passage.
House Democratic leaders urged skittish colleagues Saturday to consider the bill not only as a health care measure, but as legislation that would help create jobs and boost the economy.
On the eve of a crucial congressional vote on health care legislation, dueling sides in the debate toted signs, gathered on college campuses and took to the phones on Saturday to make last-minute appeals to influence the outcome of a yearlong political drama that could culminate today in Congress.
“We’re all on pins and needles. This is going to be a historic vote,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and a supporter of the $940 billion health care overhaul legislation.
“It’s not everything we wanted, but it’s an important step. It’s a step that hasn’t been taken in 45 years,” he said, not since the 1965 passage of the Medicare and Medicaid federal health insurance programs.
On Saturday, Wright and other overhaul boosters gathered at California State University, Sacramento, to press California’s delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives to support the health care bill.
They got crucial support from two Central Valley congressmen – Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater, and Jim Costa, D-Fresno – both moderate Blue Dog Democrats who had been wavering because of their concern over the abortion issue.
Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, has been helping the Democratic leadership herd votes to win passage for the bill.
“We know that insurance companies have been given a free ride. So, we want to hold them accountable,” she said Saturday during a critical session of the House Rules Committee, a necessary prelude to today’s vote.
Cardoza announced his support at the Rules Committee meeting.
Meanwhile, local opponents of the overhaul bill toted signs on sidewalks near the Galleria at Roseville to urge Congress to “Kill the Bill.”
Both sides have been working phone banks over the past week to lobby members of Congress.
Karin Zink, a registered nurse from Redding who was at the CSUS campus on Saturday visiting her son, knows the high stakes involved, but confessed to not having a mastery of the details.
She supports the legislation’s intentions, she said, but “things change so often that it’s difficult to keep up.”
Like other Americans, she said, she doesn’t know where the system first went wrong. “Who knows what’s at the center of the problem? I just want to know, who’s going to be speaking for us?
“Right now, most people are only paying attention to the fight,” she said. “Maybe people like the controversy. But it’s difficult to say whether people really do understand what’s going on.”
Margie Metzler, 65, of the Gray Panthers and the Older Women’s League took part in the CSUS rally. She said she was uninsured for four years before becoming eligible for Medicare. “That was the most terrifying time in my life,” she said.
Following the rally, about 60 people sat through a forum on health care.
Craig DeLuz, a Republican candidate for Assembly and opponent of the health care bill, was outnumbered on the panel.
He called the bill “a wholesale big-government takeover of our health care system.”
His brother David DeLuz, who also took part on the panel, disagreed. David DeLuz, president of the Greater Sacramento Urban League, called today’s expected vote historic, adding that it represented an opportunity for working families to get affordable health care coverage.
Tags: Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Civil Rights Leader, Controversial Plan, Democratic Leaders, Election Scenarios, Gloom And Doom, Health Care Legislation, Health Care System, Hill House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Republican Leaders, Rules Of Debate, Sexual Insults, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Undecided Votes, Vote President
