Conference Call with Senator Thune
Senator John Thune of South Dakota held a conference call this morning to discuss healthcare. The news out of Washington remains bleak. While Senate Republicans will do everything in their power to stop the Democrats from ramming through Obamacare, without the votes it will be hard to stop.
One of the tricks the Democrats are attempting right now pertains to the so-called ‘Doc Fix.’ This is the nickname for the Medicare doctor reimbursement. Democrats have separated this from the larger healthcare bill in order to hide the overall costs. In January, the Doc Fix is due for a 21.5% cut. But word broke late last week and was widely reported this week that Democrats are trying to get doctors to support healthcare by paying them off and not implementing the cut. The Doc Fix would add $250B to the debt and not be included in the cost of the larger bill. Senator Thune indicated, though, that a number of Senate Democrats were uneasy about this and might not go along with it.
Right now, the Senate appears headed for a potential vote on a healthcare bill this week or next week. There are currently 3 House bills and 2 Senate bills out there. These will ultimately be merged in some way, shape or form and then moved to conference.
Senator Thune said all of these bills shared a couple of common characteristsics. Both would 1) result in higher costs and 2) higher taxes. The Senate bill (I believe the Baucus version) includes a 40% excise tax on Cadillac plans and, of course, then there is the individual mandate forcing people to get insurance or be fined.
Thune said, according to the CBO, 90% of the taxes in the Senate Finance Committee bill would fall on those making under $200k a year. And another scoring of the bill showed that over 50% of the taxes would be burdened by those making under $100k or more. Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on the middle class? Out the window.
Thune said this would result (if it passes) in a $1.8T expansion of the federal government.
Regarding the public option, Senator Thune said that a month ago he thought it was dead in the Senate but now the public option was ‘being resurrected.’ The public option, the Senator said, is what ‘most Democrats in Congress want’ and they ’see this as their window of opportunity’ to get this done.
One of the things the Republicans will push for is a full and lengthy debate, as well as posting the final bill for the public to see for 72 hours before a final vote. As a point of comparison, Senator Thune mentioned that debate for ‘No Child Left Behind’ took 7 weeks and debate on the farm bill lasted for 4 weeks. Certainly, the healthcare bill, which affects 1/6th of our economy, merits a debate just as lengthy as these bills.
Senator Thune took a few questions from callers. First, the Senator was asked if there were any studies that showed what impact this would have on the inurance industry. He mentioned that there were estimates that 83M-120M people would move off of private insurance and that, presumably, the industry would also ‘lose a whole lot of jobs.’
The Senator was also asked about what the Republicans’ plans were to oppose this. Without trying to sound too pessimistic, the Senator flatly said ‘they (the Democrats) have the votes.’ The Senator also said the Republicans will ’use all of the tools and procedures’ at their disposal but, again, acknowledged that the minority is in a tough spot with respect to stopping the bill – particularly considering the Democrats will likely try everything to get this passed.
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Personally, this is my third conference call with lawmakers on The Hill in the past week or so. In each of these calls, the underlying tone has been one of pessimism and the need for us to re-energize and pressure key legislators to oppose this bill which would utterly destroy our healthcare system.
We need to re-double our efforts NOW and bombard Congress with e-mails and phone. And we simply can’t let up or we will definitely lose this battle.
Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude!
