Healthcare Bills

WASHINGTON — With a critical vote looming this weekend, Senate Democrats reached a deal with the lone Democratic holdout -- Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, who will back the party's healthcare bill after settling weeks of negotiating over abortion. That would give Democrats the 60 votes they need to quash a series of Republican-led filibusters and pass a bill by Christmas. Nelson, who was pushing for tougher restrictions on federal funding for abortion, reached the agreement with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office after round-the-clock talks with Reid and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.

After a dramatic month of round-the-clock negotiating and deal-making on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats unified today behind sweeping healthcare legislation that they can pass by Christmas, giving a powerful boost to President Obama's drive to overhaul the nation's healthcare system. The breakthrough, engineered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his lieutenants, cleared a final roadblock over federal funding for abortion, the same issue that nearly stopped the House from passing a healthcare bill six weeks ago. With the deal, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a strong opponent of abortion rights, became the 60th and crucial last member of the Democratic caucus to line up behind the healthcare legislation.

Sold on Baja Re "Paradise, and peril, by the sea," Column One, Dec. 14 Thank you for printing an accurate story on Americans in Baja California. The violence in Baja, while frightening, has been almost exclusively within the drug trade. The random violence we see in the U.S. is unheard of in Mexico. In Long Beach, where I have lived all my life, we have had many shootings over the years, including the recent killing of an innocent girl at a local high school football game.

The White House and several advocacy groups banded together Thursday in an attempt to pacify liberals who are furious over compromises made to the Senate healthcare legislation. The bill's advocates said that it still would make a difference in the lives of Americans, and warned that the cost of failure was high. Former President Clinton issued a statement that said: "America can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And this is a good bill." And abandoning the effort to pass healthcare legislation would be "a tragic outcome," David Axelrod, a senior advisor to President Obama, told MSNBC.

When Senate Democratic leaders agreed this week to remove a public insurance plan from their massive healthcare bill, they did more than quash a liberal dream of expanding the government safety net. They effectively pinned their hopes of guaranteeing coverage to all Americans on a far more conventional prescription: government regulation. The change sprang from a compromise made to placate conservative Democrats wary of a new government program. But shorn of a "public option," the Senate healthcare bill has reverted to a long-established practice of leveraging government power to police the private sector, rather than compete with it. Despite the resistance among Republicans and conservatives to more government regulation, even the insurance industry has agreed to broad new oversight of their business in exchange for the prospect of gaining millions of new customers.

Proposals before Congress to allow insurance companies to market and sell healthcare policies nationwide are coming under attack from proponents of the current system of state-by-state oversight. A key but lesser-known facet of the healthcare bills in the House and Senate would allow insurers to register in one state but sell policies in many other states as well. That could allow insurers to ignore insurance laws in all but their home state and make it impossible for regulators in states with tough consumer protection laws to enforce them, a group of Democratic lawmakers says in a letter obtained by The Times.

The debate over healthcare reform is focused on such a small number of hot issues -- should there be a public option, Medicare buy-in, government-paid mental health counseling for Sen. Lieberman? -- that dozens of other questions are cruising under the radar. Here's one worth a lot more attention than it has been getting: Is Congress poised to make a big payoff to biotech firms and their venture backers by hindering the entry of a new class of generic drugs into the marketplace?

The path to enacting the first major healthcare overhaul in decades opened wider Tuesday, as the Senate voted down a divisive proposal for direct importation of prescription drugs, and President Obama rallied Democrats behind a decision to put aside one of liberals' most cherished ideas -- creating a government alternative to private medical insurance. Obama summoned Senate Democrats to the White House on Tuesday to urge them not to let disagreements over details of the legislation derail or delay the landmark effort.

In a victory for President Obama and his allies in the pharmaceutical industry, the Senate today turned aside a bid by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to make it easier to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Western Europe -- a proposal that threatened to derail the Democrats' landmark healthcare bill. The vote on the amendment -- cosponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- was 51-48, nine short of the 60 needed to pass. The politically charged amendment held up the Senate for a week as drug companies, the White House and lawmakers from states that are home to drug makers fought to derail the proposal.

Some reader questions about the proposed healthcare legislation in Congress: How reliable are Congressional Budget Office cost estimates for the healthcare bills? I keep hearing that the bill is much more expensive than the CBO says. The CBO's job is to give lawmakers an idea of what a bill would cost over the first decade it was in force. In the House and Senate healthcare bills, some of the costs wouldn't take effect for several years, but some of the savings would take effect immediately.