WASHINGTON – Democrats are still struggling to find a strategy that will let them push a health care overhaul through the Senate and fulfill President Barack Obama’s goal of signing a bill this year.
A day after Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Democratic bill would include the option of a government insurance plan, moderates in his own party lost no time Tuesday in voicing their displeasure. Reid, D-Nev., needs every Democrat to break the filibusters Republicans are vowing to mount. But some of the moderates refuse to say whether they’ll stick with their leader on procedural votes, let alone those on the merits of the bill.
“We are a long way from reaching conclusion,” said Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in a similar position in the House. Efforts to draft a consensus health care bill for a vote have been stalled for more than two weeks because of disagreements among Democrats. There are nine weeks left in the year to deliver a bill to Obama’s desk.
Intense days and nights lie ahead, said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. Senators who don’t like the bill will find themselves the focus of a “prayer session,” said Nelson.
“They will pray that the retribution of God doesn’t come down on them,” he joked.
Nonetheless, moderate Democratic senators who control the balance of power on health care were holding their ground. Republican opposition stiffened, and party leaders announced they would attempt to strangle the bill before formal debate begins. Despite the obstacles, senior Democrats cast Reid’s draft legislation as a turning point. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said there is now a “sense of inevitability ... that, yes, we’re going to pass health care reform.”
The government insurance option long ago emerged as the biggest flashpoint in both the House and Senate as Democrats try to pass legislation that extends coverage, bans insurance practices such as denial of coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions and slows the growth of health care spending nationally.
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