House Democrats Press Leadership On Health Care Bill

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
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During a nearly two hour caucus conference call this afternoon, rank and file Democrats sought answers from their leadership about the state of ongoing House, White House health care negotiations. But they may not get concrete responses until the caucus meets again next week, or, failing that, until President Obama huddles with members at the Democrats’ issue conference next week at Fort McNair.

“The questions were about national exchanges, about the public option, about the Cadillac plans, about consumer protection, about insurance reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and one of the chief authors of the House health care bill. “We told them what things the staff had started to discuss or haven’t discussed yet.”

According to a House leadership aide, members chief concerns on the call regarded a familiar array of issues. “Many members raised concerns about excise tax (in opposition to it),” the aide said. State exchanges came up — many Members want a national exchange. Several spoke up also in favor of anti-trust exemption (repealing it) and keeping in place strong insurance reforms.”

In an exclusive interview, Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) told me members discussed “how the exchanges are structured, what we do with the surcharges on the high benefit plans–those were two of the main issues that they talked about.”

DeGette–a leading pro-choice Democrat–said abortion isn’t really on the table yet.

“What the Speaker said is there are several issues–and abortion is one of them–that aren’t the core issues in the bill right now, so [leadership and the White House] haven’t really been talking about them yet,” she said.

Though Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team didn’t have many answers for members (not much has been officially decided) Rep. John Larson (D-CT) said they’ll have more to say soon. “A lot of that will be sorted out Tuesday evening’s caucus, the 12th,” Larson said. “The President’s coming next week, we have our issues conference next week. The Democratic issues conference is next week.”

The question of the excise tax on Cadillac insurance plans has become the leading point of contention–and many members are extremely concerned. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, told me he believes President Obama has run afoul of his campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class.

The House raises money by taxing millionaires via a surtax–a measure that won’t fly in the Senate. And just how that will be resolved remains unclear.

“We may have to have both, or some combination,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ). “We don’t need the entire surcharge.”

The Senate bill also raises revenue by increasing the Medicare payroll tax on people earning more than $250,000 a year.

“I think the [payroll-tax is] similar to the surcharge [on millionaires] so there might be some way to work with that so that the Senators go along in some way with what we have in mind,” Pallone said.

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