One of Sen. Kennedy's senior aids is suggesting pay-go exception for healthcare reform, per report by The Hill
07 11 08 - 12:05
Kennedy aide suggests healthcare pay-go exceptions
By Jeffrey Young
Healthcare reform could require Congress to make exceptions to pay-as-you-go budgeting, according to one of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) most senior aides.
“Certainly, there’s a strong inclination within large quarters of Congress that [health reform] has to be substantially paid for, but whether it’s every penny, every dime – those discussions still have to happen,” Kennedy aide Michael Myers said at a briefing hosted by the liberal healthcare group Families USA Thursday.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats will have to address budgetary considerations of healthcare reform next year “whether it’s formal pay-go or some other mechanism,” said Myers, staff director of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Kennedy chairs.
Legislation based on President-elect Barack Obama’s proposals would have a net annual cost of as much as $60 billion, according to his campaign’s own estimates. Democratic leaders will be under pressure from budget hawks within their own party not to increase the deficit.
Democrats have followed so-called pay-go budget rules requiring any new spending or tax cuts by offset by spending decreases or tax increases elsewhere in the budget since taking over Congress in 2006.
But they’ve made exceptions. The financial bailout bill, legislation to reprieve middle class workers from the Alternative Minimum Tax and the recent stimulus bill all required deficit spending.
“To the extent that you’ve got some members of Congress who are saying we need to pay for most, all, or whatever, that’s going to be a big challenge,” said Ron Pollack, the president of Families USA and a prominent liberal voice on healthcare.
“That isn’t settled yet,” Myers emphasized. “Certainly, President Obama and his White House will have a lot to say about how we address this within the budget,” he said.
During the campaign, Obama said he would pay for his plan with new revenue from not renewing some of President Bush’s tax cuts and promised that his proposals would reduce costs.
“We’re looking at ways, through healthcare reform itself, that will save a lot of money,” Myers said.
Pollack, who acknowledged comprehensive reform will be expensive, expressed hope that skeptical budget hawks would consider the future benefits of Obama’s cost-cutting measures.
“I hope that there is some flexibility in understanding that the long-term changes that get made will result in cost savings in the long run,” he added.
Obama’s platform includes numerous planks that experts expect would eventually lead to lower-cost healthcare, such as greater use of information technology in medicine.
History shows, however, that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not calculated that these efforts would save any money.
“It’s not clear that some of the long-term, system changes that undoubtedly will be debated, and probably a fair number of them made, it’s not clear whether CBO is going to score them as providing significant savings in the first five years or first 10 years,” Pollack said.
Democratic leaders faces countervailing demands from liberal groups that aided their rise to power.
At the Families USA event, a representative of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) made clear its members expect action, whatever the budgetary implications.
“We do not accept the answer that we cannot do healthcare reform now because we don’t have the money,” said Dennis Rivera, chairman of SEIU Healthcare.
Congress just provided $700 billion for the financial bailout bill, Rivera noted. “It doesn’t end there,” he said.
“We are not going to be looking with great enthusiasm that we be denied healthcare reform because of the inability to pay, because in the recent past when there was a crisis to be addressed, the money was found,” Rivera said.
No matter how healthcare reform is budgeted, Myers made clear that Kennedy views Obama as the leader of the Democratic effort.
“I think everyone in Congress, at least on the Democratic side, certainly Sen. Kennedy, is going to be taking their cues from the Obama White House on this effort,” Myers said.
Though ailing with a brain tumor, Kennedy has striven to take control of the health reform agenda in the next Congress. “In anticipation of an Obama victory, a lot of preparatory work has been done over the past few weeks,” Myers said.
Kennedy organized meetings between members of his committee and meetings with staff from his panel and from the Senate Finance Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).
Baucus has been busy on his own, however, and his committee has jurisdiction over a vast swath of the healthcare sphere, including Medicare and the tax code.
Baucus plans to issue a “white paper” spelling out his principles on health reform next week.
“The analysis and outlook that I will unveil next week will detail specific policy areas and proposals on which I believe the Congress must move forward to achieve successful healthcare reform,” Baucus wrote in a letter delivered to Obama Thursday.
Kennedy has no immediate plans to release a similar list of proposals, Myers indicated, and believes Democrats should only produce one piece of healthcare reform legislation, based on Obama’s plan.
“As politicians, people will want to be able to say, ‘Here was my idea. I am a leader on healthcare, too,’” Myers said. “But in the end, I think there’s a growing recognition that the best way, and maybe even the only way, that this gets done is for Democrats to unite behind a single bill. Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Baucus have talked about that.”
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