House Democratic leaders intensified the pressure on undecided members of their own caucus, as they searched for the handful of votes needed to pass a sweeping health care bill they plan to take up on Sunday.
The party received good news when the Congressional Budget Office released an estimated cost for the bill put forward by President Obama. The CBO gave the plan a price tag of $940 billion and said it would save $138 billion in the next decade and $1.2 trillion in the following 10 years through tax increases and cuts to Medicare.
“I think it’s going to produce votes for us from some of the Democrats that have been the hardest to get to come along,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said.
But Democrats are still short of the 216 votes they need to pass the bill and as Sunday’s vote looms, holdouts like Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., are facing enormous pressure to support the measure.
Lynch said he opposes the bill because it differs too greatly from the House-passed version of health care, which included a government-run public option. Lynch does not trust the Senate to make certain corrections to the bill under a second piece of legislation that they would have to pass using a special tactic called budget reconciliation. Those corrections include protecting unions from a planned excise tax on expensive insurance policies. Senate Democratic leaders have suggested they would be unable to pass the reconciliation bill sent over by the House without making changes to it.
“The fact is, we are about to spend almost a trillion dollars and a trillion dollar bill should not require fixing in significant ways,” Lynch said. “There is a difference between compromise and surrender and this is a complete surrender of all the things that people thought were important for health care reform.”
But Lynch stopped short of a pledge to vote against the bill, despite his protests. On Thursday afternoon, he was headed to the White House for a private meeting with Obama, who days earlier used a one-on-one huddle on Air Force One to flip liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, from a “no” to a “yes.”
House Democratic leaders were also working their wavering members. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had an intense, 15-minute talk with Rep. Zach Space, D-Ohio, on the floor of the House Thursday. Space represents a swing district. He voted for the House bill in November but is now undecided.
At this point, Pelosi and others pushing for the bill’s passage are telling the undecided that the fate of health care reform rests on their shoulders.
“The vote this weekend will demonstrate clearly which side Democrats are on in the United States Congress,” Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson, D-Conn., said.
Making matters more difficult for Democrats, the corrections bill does not remove all of the special deals carved out for certain states, such as an additional $300,000 million in federal aid for Louisiana.
