| As you may have heard, Senate leadership have agreed to support a scaled-down version of Ron Wyden's "Free Choice Amendment," which would attempt to open up health exchanges to those who currently have employer-based health care, but would wish to switch:
As part of an agreement hashed out at the end of the Finance Committee mark up process, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) will join forces to amend the Senate health care bill with Wyden's "Free Choice Act." If it can attract 60 votes, it would give low- and middle-class Americans with employer-provided insurance the option of purchasing subsidized insurance in the exchanges.
Sixty is a tough climb. It would have likely been impossible under the original terms of the Wyden amendment, which would have opened the exchanges up to everybody. This is a scaled down version of that, and it will be a hard amendment for Democrats to vote against.
Estimates of additional participation in the exchange--no notation of whether it would be public or private plans, which I assume means they counted both--apparently run about 1 million. Of course, that's among those who already had insurance, albeit costly or insufficient coverage.
There will be time to discuss his proposal as it comes up for a vote--but in a separate, broader piece at TPM by AP pre-gaming the initial cloture vote in the Senate tomorrow, is this nugget: Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Friday that Senate leaders will support an amendment he plans to offer to allow certain low-income people with offers of employer health coverage to shop in the purchasing exchanges instead. Wyden had not committed to voting for Saturday's procedural motion prior to securing the commitment from Reid to support his amendment. The amendment would extend health coverage to 1 million more people who would not otherwise have been able to afford the coverage offered by their employers, according to Wyden's spokeswoman. [emph mine]
It's not clear who said this--Wyden's spokesperson, who is cited in the statement immediately after that one, or the AP reporter operating on the fact that Wyden had made no public pronouncements of support for cloture. And it's not 100% obvious that he's stated his support AFTER getting his amendment a hearing, although it damn well better be a Yes, and I don't think anyone suspected otherwise. (If you know of such a statement indicating he's a definite Yes now, let me know.)
But unless the AP reporter is simply trying to make trouble, the strong implication is that prior to Reid's support for Free Choice, not even the Majority Leader had been able to fully count on Wyden's support for health care reform--and that support was in fact the predicate for Wyden's Aye on initial cloture. If that's the case, how is he any different from Ben Nelson, or--gulp--Joe Lieberman? To think that there was really some kind of chance--or even that Wyden was bluffing as such--that he would risk the entire HCR bill over his pet project, is extremely unsettling. It's been the pattern for Wyden to withhold support on larger health care reform issues until his ideas had been addressed, and this instance appears no different. As the estimate indicates, getting one million people to switch to the exchange neither saves as much money or covers as many uninsured (since Free Choice covers zero of those folks) as the larger bill...and to suggest or even allow the suggestion that Wyden's vote was in doubt based on whether his particular concerns were addressed, is the kind of political toying with people's lives that leads folks to mistrust the motives of our representation in government. Let's hope with the pacifier having been proffered, that "commitment" can be safely assured.
...but I wouldn't bet on it just yet. |
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