President Barack Obama’s Democratic allies raced Tuesday to enact his top domestic goal, remaking US health care, spurred on by a special election that could cost them their Senate supermajority.
“We are, I think, moving forward. We are not done,” said Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who indicated that the entire complex process could be wrapped up in 15 days.
With talks on the overhaul at a critical point, Democrats publicly refused to consider that they could lose the late Democratic icon Ted Kennedy’s spot
— and thus the 60-vote bloc needed to overrun Republicans delaying tactics.
“Moving ahead on health care is essential if we’re going to make sure that every American has access to affordable, quality health care,” Hoyer told reporters.
But many aides speculated privately about the historic legislation’s fate if little-known Republican state senator Scott Brown were to pull off a stunning upset of Democrat Martha Coakley in a race she had been expected to easily win.
Hoyer said top Democrats still hoped to meld rival Senate and House of Representatives versions of the legislation into one compromise, which would then need to win approval from both chambers before going to Obama.
But a victory by Brown, who has vowed to oppose the legislation, would give them little time to act before he is seated, a process Senate and Massachusetts electoral officials suggest may take at least ten days.
Asked whether Democrats could reach their elusive House-Senate deal, craft a formal bill, and hold the votes all in the next two weeks, Hoyer replied:
“Yes.”
Another option would be for the House to pass the Senate’s version of the legislation unchanged, sending it to Obama to sign into law despite deep misgivings among many House members about that bill.
“The Senate bill clearly is better than nothing,” said Hoyer.
But “our objective is to get agreement, and not to take the Senate bill or the House bill but to come to an agreement as is normal legislative process,”
he said. “We are making progress on resolving the differences.”
At stake was a Democratic plan, fiercely opposed by Republicans, that aims to extend health care coverage to as many as 35 million of the 36 million Americans who lack it now and curb abusive insurance company practices.
Democrats working on the final compromise had next to no margin for error:
The Senate passed its bill on Christmas Eve by exactly the 60 votes needed and the House got just two more than the 218 needed seven weeks earlier.
Democrats have said they hope to pass a compromise bill before Obama’s marquee annual State of the Union address, now set for January 27.
The United States is the world’s richest nation but the only industrialized democracy that does not provide health care coverage to all of its citizens.
The United States spends more than double what Britain, France and Germany do per person on health care.
But it lags behind other countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
