House panel clears HHS approps bill

After deflecting a series of GOP efforts to dilute healthcare reform, Democrats on the House Appropriations Labor, HHS and Education Subcommittee passed their funding blueprint for fiscal 2011 on Thursday, including more than $560 million to fight fraud in the healthcare sector — an 80 percent hike over this year. 

The vote was 11 to 5, strictly along party lines.

Panel Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said the sweeping bill — which provides $13 billion above 2010 spending for Labor, HHS and Education programs — is hardly large enough to cover the need created by the recent recession.

“This bill is hugely inadequate for the task,” Obey said, “but it’s the best we can do given our fiscal limitations.” 

Republicans had a different take, arguing the cost is much too high given current levels of deficit spending. 

“At some point we need to get this spending under control,” said Rep. Todd Tiahrt (Kan.), the senior Republican on the subcommittee. 

Obey countered that the Bush administration, with help from a GOP-controlled Congress, passed a long series of unfunded initiatives, including the Bush tax cuts and Medicare’s prescription drug benefit. Part D was “not paid for with anything but borrowed money,” Obey said. 

“So much for fiscal responsibility.”

Tiahrt on Thursday led Republicans in pushing a series of amendments designed to dilute the funding bill, many of them focused on scaling back the Democrats’ new healthcare reform law. Those provisions included efforts to:

• Reinstall the Stupak/Pitts abortion amendment that had passed an early version of the House healthcare bill, only to be stripped out with much controversy in the final bill. (“This is not the venue for this issue,” Obey said.)

• Repeal and replace the healthcare law. (“This is not our jurisdiction,” Obey said.)

• Repeal the individual insurance mandate in the healthcare law. (“We have no business trying to repeal an authorization,” Obey said.)

• Repeal a health reform provision requiring businesses to file tax forms when they spend more than $600 on goods through any single company. (“We’re stepping into territory we know very little about,” Obey said.)

All of these were shot down by either a voice vote or a party-line roll call tally.

The bill now moves to the House floor.