|
Dems eye veto-proof margin on SCHIP |
|
By Elana Schor
|
|
Posted: 07/26/07 08:08 PM [ET] |
Confident Senate Democrats are attempting to attract a veto-proof 67 votes for their politically popular children’s healthcare bill.
Six GOP senators supported the $35 billion reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, during committee consideration, adding to the bill’s momentum. The measure is expected to be debated on the Senate floor before the August recess.
GOP leaders plan to offer an alternative that keeps new SCHIP funding closer to President Bush’s proposal, but the irresistible cause of healthcare for low-income children is proving difficult to strongly oppose.
“Enrolling nearly 6.6 million children and lowering the uninsured rate by nearly 25 percent, SCHIP has been a success,” five senior Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), wrote to the GOP conference on Tuesday.
“We support the reauthorization of SCHIP.”
Conceding the success of the program, Republicans contend that the SCHIP reauthorization would open the door to eventual government-run healthcare, invoking the specter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) failed universal coverage effort in the 1990s.
GOP leaders also point to what Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), ranking member of the Budget Committee and a cosponsor of the leadership’s alternative, calls a “budget gimmick”: the low estimate of SCHIP spending in the bill’s final year, allowing the entire package to be offset under pay-as-you-go rules.
Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) dismissed the GOP alternative, which also includes long-held Republican goals of tax-free health savings accounts and small business health plans, at a cost of about $9 billion.
“This so-called alternative would leave a lot of low-income uninsured kids with no alternative at all for health care,” Baucus said in a statement. “They shouldn’t call their proposal CHIP. It’s really ‘CLIP’ – a Children Losing Insurance Plan.”
Democrats have yet to openly predict vote counts for the SCHIP measure, but the 60-vote margin likely needed for passage appears well within reach.
“The committee vote showed there is strong bipartisan support for the package,” Baucus spokeswoman Carol Guthrie said. “Senators who care about kids are going to rally around this proposal.”
Republicans facing difficult reelections in 2008 are considered prime candidates to join the bipartisan SCHIP alliance.
Two in that group, Sens. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Gordon Smith (Ore.), have already come on board, and Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Norm Coleman (Minn.), John Sununu (N.H.), John Warner (Va.) and others in cycle will be closely watched.
One Finance aide expressed confidence — contingent upon the defeat of Democratic amendments to expand the bill and Republican amendments to shrink it.
“We hope to get at least 67 votes, but it won’t be easy,” the aide said.
Getting to 67 votes would send a strong signal to the White House, where Bush has vowed to veto the Senate measure despite Republican entreaties. Bush has promoted his plan for preferred tax treatment of certain health insurance plans as a companion to SCHIP, but the Senate GOP rebuffed that proposal in their alternative.
A strong showing in the Senate also could lend momentum to the $75 billion House SCHIP bill, which includes cuts to private Medicare providers and has aroused hotter partisan tensions. House Republicans released their own SCHIP alternative yesterday, with Democrats offering condemnation similar to that in the Senate.
The Senate bill offsets SCHIP expansion with a 61-cent hike in the tobacco tax, potentially alienating anti-tax conservatives in states that rely on the children’s health program. Still, Democrats believe they can fend off Republican attempts to expand the debate beyond the popular program at hand.
“This debate is about providing healthcare to children who are eligible and need that healthcare,” one senior majority aide said. “They want to have a larger, overall healthcare debate because they know that SCHIP is a bipartisan program that’s shown to work. If this is just a debate about SCHIP, they lose.”
Meanwhile, tobacco companies are continuing to encourage grassroots lobbying of lawmakers as floor debate approaches, said John Singleton, spokesman for Reynolds American. The industry also is pointing to what it believes is a contradiction between the SCHIP bill and Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) plan, now pending in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, to regulate tobacco through the Food and Drug Administration.
Kennedy’s bill aims to cut down the number of American smokers, Singleton said, “and at the same time, we’re looking at this SCHIP bill, which says they want 61 cents per pack to fund what is clearly going to be a growing healthcare program.”
Reynolds crystallized its strategy in a statement last week: “Does the Right Hand of the Senate Know What the Left Hand is Doing?”
|
