A preliminary draft of a bipartisan health care plan under negotiation in the Senate would eventually decrease the deficit and substantially undercut the cost of other plans, according to an independent analysis.
The news bolstered the spirits of the group of six Republican and Democratic Senate negotiators led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. Baucus emerged from another day of closed-door talks with the five other lawmakers to announce that a preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office showed that not only would their bill avoid adding to the deficit, it would cut it by billions of dollars in its 10th year while providing coverage for 95 percent of Americans by 2015.
Baucus said the development “will clearly help us as we continue our discussions,” while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called the analysis “another positive step toward delivering fiscally responsible health insurance reform.”
The staggering cost of the congressional health care reform proposals have been a roadblock to voting on a bill before the August recess, as President Barack Obama had demanded. Even with the preliminary report on the Baucus bill, they will wait until September at the earliest to consider a bill.
Centrist Democrats and the handful of moderate Republicans who might vote for a health care reform bill have demanded that any proposal not add to the deficit.
The new CBO numbers cut the cost of the Finance bill considerably. Weeks ago, the CBO gave the plan a $1.6 trillion price tag. The group went back and rewrote it, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said, lowering the cost to $800 billion.
Two other health care bills Congress is weighing are much more expensive.
The CBO last month gave a committee-approved partisan Senate bill a $645 billion price tag, but that figure did not include the cost of expanding Medicaid under a public health care option called for in the legislation, which would add about $500 billion to the total cost, according to committee aides.
A House bill authored by Democrats, which would also create a public health care option, topped $1 trillion, according to the CBO.
Baucus also warned that the latest CBO estimate of his bill excluded some provisions that could add to the cost, but he did not provide the specifics. The CBO figures were provided directly to the senators and are not publicly available.
The bipartisan bill would call for the creation of an insurance cooperative instead of a public health care option. The co-op would be the third-largest insurer in the nation, according to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a negotiator. Conrad said the plan would initially insure 12 million people.
The panel has not finished the bill, despite encouraging headlines suggesting an imminent deal.
“No deal is at hand, and substantive issues, big and small, remain under discussion and need to be resolved,” said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., one of the negotiators.
