Reid: Obamacare negotiator

The Senate minority leader, who announced Friday he’s retiring at the end of next year, steered the most sweeping health reform since Medicare and Medicaid through turbulent, divisive negotiations and managed to hand President Obama the domestic law his presidency will perhaps best be known for.

“With the exception of his efforts to get the economic stimulus bill passed, I’m not sure I ever saw him work as hard as trying to get health reform over the goal line,” said Jim Manley, who served as Reid’s senior communications advisor at the time.

When Obama took office in 2009, he announced health reform would be a top priority, and Reid spent the next year striving with other Democratic leaders to push it through. Few topics are more contentious than health reform and the legislation was often nearly derailed, as Reid tried to reconcile his caucus’s liberals and conservatives to it and ultimately lost all GOP support.

In the end, the 2010 Affordable Care Act was born. And while it’s still massively controversial — with Republicans spending their fourth election in a row vowing to dismantle it — Reid views the law as one of the biggest accomplishments of his nearly three decades in office.

Two years in, the law has resulted in millions of Americans obtaining health insurance, some through expanded Medicaid programs and some through buying federally-subsidized private plans. It also places new regulations on insurers and requires Americans to buy coverage and employers to provide it.

“We did it,” Reid told Politico in December. “It’s the hallmark of the first six years of the administration. I think it’s a wonderful legacy for [Obama]. I spent months, weeks right in his office, making sure it got done.”

Obama called Reid a “fighter.” “In his five terms as a U.S. senator, Harry has fought for good jobs, a safer environment for our kids and affordable health care for all,” he said in a statement Friday.

That “fighter” showed up time and time again as Reid tried to navigate the law to passage but hit lots of bumps along the way.

The saga of how the healthcare law came to be is a long, complicated one. Multiple committees in the House and Senate passed different versions of it and big questions, like whether it should include a government-run insurance plan, sharply divided Democrats.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle was disputes over whether it should include a government-run plan. That was a top priority for more liberal Democrats, like now-retired Sen. Tom Harkin and Sen. Bernie Sanders, but moderates had deep qualms.

In the fall leading up to the law’s passage, Reid announced that the legislation would include a government-run plan, but that states could opt out of it. He even appointed a committee of 10 Democrats — half liberal and half moderate — to hammer out differences, but members eventually decided the public plan was too controversial to include at all.

And then there was the law’s final passage, the most controversial part of the whole process. Senate Democrats passed the legislation and then sent it over to the House. In the meantime, they lost their 60-vote majority when Sen. Ted Kennedy passed away and former Sen. Scott Brown won his seat.

When the legislation came back to the Senate for final passage, Reid used alternative rules that required only a simple majority to pass it, thus circumventing a GOP filibuster.

And right up to the last minute, another controversy over language limiting federal funds for abortions also nearly killed things.

Reid was at the center of it all, pleading, cajoling and begging members to reach agreement on the massive, groundbreaking law.

“I’ve always felt the Affordable Care Act exercise combined Reid’s core traits: tenacity, loyalty — he to his caucus and vice versa, and standing up for the little guy,” said Democratic lobbyist Rich Tarplin.

Reid’s exhaustion from the whole process showed once when he accidentally voted against the healthcare legislation the first time the Senate passed it, on Christmas Eve 2009. He ended up making a joke out of it, Manley recalled.

“He walked off the floor and he doesn’t smile a lot — but you could tell he was very proud of what had just happened,” Manley said. “He wasn’t emotional or anything like that, but he knew he had done good.”

Reid often angered Republicans throughout the process, at one time suggesting their opposition to health reform is similar to supporting slavery. But while he’s been one of the law’s strongest champions, he’s also admitted the law has gone through plenty of hard time, especially during the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov, the federal online insurance marketplace.

“We never recovered from the Obamacare rollout,” Reid told Politico. “I’m not going to beat up on Obama. The rollout didn’t go well. We never recovered from that.”

But that doesn’t change his pride in the law. “I can assure you this is among his proudest achievements,” Manley said.