Dems Say They'll Take a Breather in Push for Healthcare Reform


Tuesday's election of Republican Scott Brown -- the Massachusetts state senator who came from behind to beat Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley -- has energized the GOP and forced disheartened Democrats to reconsider their strategy for passing healthcare reform.

"Things are heated," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters Wednesday. "Emotions are running high. We're trying to take a breath," he said, adding that no decision on how to proceed would be made today, and maybe not even next week.

One potential strategy for moving healthcare reform would involve taking a Senate vote in the next few weeks before Brown is officially sworn in, while Democrats still have a 60-vote supermajority in the upper chamber.

The 60 percent margin is required by Senate rules to overcome a Republican filibuster that would prevent the bill from coming to a vote, even though it probably has enough support to pass with a normal majority.

But on Wednesday, the president voiced his opposition for the rush-and-vote strategy, and Democrat leaders followed suit.

"We're not going to rush into anything," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters Wednesday. "We're going to wait until the new senator arrives before we do anything on healthcare," he said.

With the quick-stroke strategy off the table, Democrats say that they still have several options for passing reform.

Under one potential scenario, members of the House would have to be convinced to adopt an identical version of the bill passed by the Senate.

But in the interim since both chambers passed their respective bills, congressional negotiators have spent weeks working to reach a compromise over how to combine the measures. Any agreements reached during that time -- including a significant deal with labor unions -- would be thrown out if the House passed the Senate's earlier version.

However, this strategy would obviate the need for the Senate to take another vote. Instead, the bill would go from the House right to the president's desk.

Senators indicated they weren't trying to pressure members of the House to go along with the Senate's bill.

"We're not going to tell the House what to do," Reid said.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), said on Tuesday that adopting the Senate version would be "better than nothing." But the Senate and House versions differ on crucial points, such as abortion funding, which would make wholesale adoption of the Senate bill very difficult.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who was a member of the House for 14 years before being elected to the Senate, said approving the Senate bill would be "a bitter pill for the House to swallow."

Yet another option being discussed on the Hill would be to scale back the reform effort and try to pass smaller, noncontroversial chunks of the overall package, including insurance provisions such as the one that bars insurance companies from denying insurance coverage based on preexisting conditions.

The problem with that option is that insurance companies only agreed to such reforms because they thought they would have access to millions of new customers who would be required to have insurance under the new law.

When asked about another option -- convincing some Republicans to support the bill -- Durbin expressed doubt over the likelihood of gaining any GOP support.

"We haven't had much luck trying to convince Republicans," he told reporters.

And they likely won't, as Republicans are pointing to the Massachusetts election as a clear sign of the nation's unwillingness to support healthcare reform.

"We ought to stop and start over and go step by step," said Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), at a Wednesday morning press conference.

The Senate and House have worked for nearly a year on healthcare reform -- with countless meetings, hearing, markups and floor debates.

Despite all that work, McConnell was insistent that the Massachusetts election sends the clear message that the American people (or at least those in Massachusetts) don't want to see healthcare reform pass.

"People in Massachusetts spoke yesterday," McConnell said. "And they spoke rather loudly that they'd like to see Congress go in another direction."

Some Democrats are pointing out that Massachusetts has near-universal healthcare coverage, which makes it a poor microcosm for the rest of the country.

But Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project HOPE, an international health education foundation, rejected that notion.

"I'm not convinced Massachusetts' current 3% uninsured rather than their previous 10% was the deciding factor for Massachusetts," she said in an e-mail. "If anything, they now understand how expanding coverage is the easy part and how the state has its back to the wall trying to figure out how to keep spending in check without torpedoing the economy."

Other experts said the Massachusetts election was about jobs and the economy more than it was about healthcare.

Leo Brideau, president and CEO of a Columbia St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisc. said Massachusetts voters sent the message that "'there are only three priorities: jobs, jobs, and jobs, so stop working on broad social change that scares me and that I can't understand and get me back to work.'"

"If the stakes weren't so high this would be fascinating theater to watch, but people's lives are at stake," Brideau said in an e-mail. "This is serious business, but I fear it will shift from being mainly about politics to being only about politics."