Monday, Feb. 08, 2010

Clyburn optimistic on health care reform

If Congress fails to overhaul health care, Democrats wanting to lay blame won't have to look outside their own party, House Majority Whip James Clyburn says.

However, Clyburn said he believes reform will happen with a series of bills, beginning this week with a House measure to repeal the anti-trust exemption for health insurance companies to bring more competition to the health care market.

Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, also wants a separate bill to outlaw discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions, one to ban insurance companies from dropping people when they come down with a catastrophic illness, and a bill to outlaw lifetime limits on insurance policies, among others.

Bills that pass in the House go to the Senate where a Jan. 19 special election in Massachusetts reduced the Democrats to 59 seats, counting two independents that caucus with them. That leaves them shy of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster to kill legislation.

Clyburn said he advocates use of a process called budget reconciliation, which amounts to a filibuster trump card, for health-care bills tied to the budget. That would put those bills to a simple majority vote, which Clyburn believes Senate Democrats can deliver.

Democrats were within one day of ironing out differences in the House and Senate to merge a health care bill when Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat, Clyburn said.

Senate Republicans have made it clear they will filibuster to kill the Democrats' health care bill and that if Democrats use budget reconciliation to counteract that, the mayhem will have just begun on Capitol Hill.

As Judd Gregg, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, told a Washington Post reporter, "You're talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."

"What's so funny about that is they didn't have that view when George Bush did his tax cuts under reconciliation," Clyburn said. "Those tax cuts for the upper income people that he put in place, those were done through reconciliation. They were not going to get enough Democrats to agree to that tax cut."

Clyburn said he favored the reconciliation approach from the beginning because he believes health-care reform should be decided by a majority, not a 60-40 vote.

That might have prevented some embarrassing developments for Democrats in the Senate, where deals were cut to reach 60 votes, most notably with Sen. Ben Nelson, who received a guarantee that the federal government would pay Nebraska's share of costs for new Medicaid recipients.

"The public started looking at this and said wait a minute," Clyburn said, and they thought, "I don't like the looks of this. I don't like the smell of this."

Death squad rumors and other distortions of the bill didn't turn around public opinion on health-care reform, Clyburn said. Americans cried foul, and that's the source of Clyburn's optimism, the reason he believes Congress will achieve health-care reform.

"I think the American people know that there is something wrong with saying to a woman who gets breast cancer who has been paying her insurance premiums for 30 years that we are going to allow the insurance companies to drop you as soon as you start your treatments," he said.

"I think there is something wrong with saying to a man with prostate cancer that we are going to allow this insurance company to stop treating you.

"I think it's wrong to say to a young mother whose child is born with juvenile diabetes that we are going to allow insurance companies to deny you coverage for your child.

"These things are just fundamentally wrong, and I do believe that we are going to get to the point where people will rise up and say, 'enough already.' I think we're at that point."