The Blue Dog revolt against the House leadership’s health care overhaul took a new turn Tuesday morning, when a several members of the centrist faction made overtures to House Republicans about joining forces to slow and reshape the bill.Republican aides said there was great interest among GOP lawmakers in trying to work with dissidents in the 52-member Blue Dog Coalition to try to stop the legislation. “Blue Dogs will be the main event all week,” said one GOP aide, referring to efforts by Republicans to woo Blue Dogs
The Gang of Six in the Senate Finance Committee wants to throw out the public option, leading Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to say that Senate leaders should “pull the plug” on bipartisan negotiations:
“What concerns me about what’s happened in the Senate Finance Committee is that they’ve had a whole lot of time to work these things out, and just don’t seem to be able to break the impasse,” Van Hollen said in an interview on the liberal “Bill Press Radio Show.” “It doesn’t seem to be as much about a disagreement over policy issues, and it seems more to be just the lack of the political will on behalf of some to get it done.” (Emphasis mine)
But given Harry Reid’s lack of spine, Van Hollen is probably asking too much. Nor is the Senate alone: blue dogs on the House Finance Committee are obstructing the legislation as well, even though chairman Henry Waxman offered them a deal late last night over their chief concern:
The fiscally conservative Blue Dogs were at odds with the leadership over setting rates for the payments to doctors and other health care providers under a proposed government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance. The House bill models the payments based on Medicare, but Blue Dogs want a negotiated rate similar to private insurance.
Press coverage of the health care debate has gotten very pessimistic, highlighting these and other setbacks. The Village Media pays an almost fawning attention to the Gang of Six. The legislation is certainly not going to meet Obama’s preferred deadline this Friday. Yet Nancy Pelosi remains confident that health care reform will pass:
Defying skeptics in her party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Sunday to overcome lingering obstacles and pass health-care reform in the House, restoring momentum to President Obama’s top domestic priority and order to her own unruly Democratic caucus.“When I take this bill to the floor, it will win,” Pelosi (Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This will happen.”
At Obsidian Wings, blogger Publius explains that many of the 52 House blue dogs are in vulnerable districts that either voted for McCain or barely voted for Obama. But eleven of them are in very pro-Obama districts:
In short, the Blue Dogs are both stronger and weaker than I thought. Most of the ones causing trouble seem to be structurally limited by electoral realities. Mike Ross, for instance, doesn’t need to be seen as helping Obama in an Arkansas district that shifted from Bush +3 to McCain +19 (I wonder why the district would do that?).At the same time, though, there are many Blue Dogs whose districts will push them the other way. Loretta Sanchez, for instance, has come out strongly for the public option. And you can understand why. It just seems impossible for the Blue Dog leadership to muster a 52-strong bloc.
And that, then, is the way to undermine the Blue Dogs. The leaders seem hopeless because they’re enjoying their day in the sun AND are constrained by their districts. So the better option is not to work from the top down, but from the bottom up.
And at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver doubts the plan from the Senate’s Gang of Six has a chance because
this particular permutation on health care reform looks an awful lot like the incomplete draft of the HELP Committee’s bill that the CBO scored last month, which also lacked an employer mandate and a public option but contained an individual mandate. That bill, the CBO estimated, would cost about $1.0 trillion — but would only cover a net of about 16 million people. In contrast, the revised version of the HELP Committee’s bill, which did include both a public option and an employer mandate, would cost about the same amount but cover a net of 37 million people. (Emphasis mine)
Furthermore, a CBO report says the blue dogs’s biggest complaint — that a public option will destroy the insurance industry — is pure nonsense:
The report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the public option proposed by Democrats would not drive private insurers out of business and most people would still choose to get their medical coverage through employers.[...]
The CBO report estimated only about 10 million to 11 million people would sign up for the public option by 2019, far fewer than the 103 million cited in another analysis by the Lewin Group. The Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.The CBO report also estimated the Democratic proposal would boost enrollment in employer-based plans by about 12 million people because of the mandate for individuals to be insured. (Emphasis mine)
As I said a week ago, rumors of the death of health care reform have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the numbers on the Democratic plan keep scoring well with the CBO:
Washington, D.C. — The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs. (Emphasis mine)
Maybe Nancy Pelosi just understands the numbers better than the Village.
