Big Unions Hail Healthcare Bill Passage, as Senate Challenge Begins

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5145/big_unions_hail_healthcare_bill_passage_as_senate_challenge_begins/

Monday November 9 12:29 pm

Union leaders joined President Obama in hailing the historic, if narrow, passage of major health reform legislation in the House this weekend.

The bill "is a fiscally responsible bill that will cover 96 percent of Americans, end insurance company discrimination and denials of care and equip health care providers with the tools they need to lower costs for families and the country as a whole," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. "The bill...does not attempt to finance reform on the backs of the working middle class... But we still have a long way to go."


Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House Democrats gather for a press conference after the House of Representatives passed the healthcare reform bill 220 to 215 late Saturday night. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)


Indeed, as this blog and other observers point out, the real sticking point in the Senate probably won't be the public option or even the extreme anti-abortion language passed in the House, but the critical issue of how to pay for the legislation. Will it be by taxing the rich, as the House does, or burdening the middle-class with new taxes and costs? That's what union advocates and the Congerssional Joint Committee on Taxation say will happen as a result of the Senate's tax on insurers that offer high-cost plans.


The conventional wisdom in Washington is, as the AP put it Sunday, that the "millionaire's tax is a non-starter" in the Senate, but grassroots activism by unions, public opinion and the strong backing of the AARP and AMA for the House version all add political clout to the drive to keep the House payment approach alive.

Over at the Daily Beast, Matt Yglesias points out the hurdles to reconciling two starkly different versions of paying for the legislation:

The merits of the two approaches aside, the work of a political compromise will be extremely difficult. The House’s approach seems to have almost no support in the Senate, and wasn’t even seriously considered by members of the Senate Finance Committee. Conversely, the Senate’s approach is opposed by labor unions, and over 150 House Democrats have signed a letter saying they also oppose it. The party leadership, simply put, has very little margin for error when it comes to trying to sort this issue out. A handful of defections from the 219 Democrats who voted in favor of reform last night could probably be made up, but not much more than a handful. And in the Senate, it essentially required Democratic unanimity to pass bills in the face of routine filibustering and solid GOP opposition.

There hasn’t been much rancor around this issue, simply because it hasn’t been in the public view. But it will be soon. How can health-care reform pass if it’s financed by a mechanism that key moderate senators have dubbed a “non-starter?” Alternatively, how can you imagine a universal health-care bill passing with no Republican support over the opposition of the AFL-CIO? Comprehensive health-care reform is closer than ever to happening, but it’s still far from obvious that it will happen.

FULL story at link.