Healthcare home-stretch: Back to House

by Noam N. Levey and Michael Muskal

The House will vote on amendments to the healthcare reconciliation bill tonight if the Senate as expected finishes its deliberations in the afternoon, lawmakers said.

The Senate is expected to take its final healthcare vote around 2 pm EDT, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said this morning. The package of amendments will then go back to the House for final passage.

"The Senate is expected to complete work [this] afternoon on the improvements bill to the new healthcare reform law," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in a prepared statement today. "If they finish their work later [today] as planned, the House will take up the improvements bill with technical corrections [this] evening."

Legislators are trying to finish off their work on healthcare before the holiday recess this weekend.

The final Senate vote will also come as President Barack Obama is set to speak on the healthcare insurance overhaul in Iowa City, Iowa. As a presidential candidate, Obama announced his healthcare plan in Iowa City in May 2007. The president's appearance will be both a victory lap and a sales pitch for the plan he signed into law Tuesday.

The House over the weekend passed the Senate version of the healthcare overhaul, and the president signed it into law on Tuesday, but the House also passed a package of amendments to make the bill more palatable to its members.

Since the signing, the Senate has been considering the House-approved amendments with Republicans fighting the legislation as they have for the last year. But after nine hours of defeating Republican amendments, Senate Democrats hit a temporary snag this morning and were forced to abandon their plans to pass the House package without changes.

Los Angeles

Republicans questioned some of the language in the parts of the bill relating to federal Pell grants for college students, forcing changes to the bill and further House action.

As an exhausted Senate labored past 2 am this morning on a stack of GOP amendments, Jim Manley, spokesman for Reid, explained that there were two minor provisions in the package of amendments that violate the Senate's budget rules.

In addition to being a healthcare bill, the overhaul changes how loans are issued. Under the bill the federal government will take that over from private banks.

Senators voted on 29 consecutive GOP amendments between 5:30 pm Wednesday and 2:30 a.m. this morning, when they recessed. The Senate resumed its deliberations this morning.

Among the amendments defeated overnight was a GOP proposal dealing with drugs for prisoners, denounced by Democrats as a politically motivated issue.

By a 57-42 vote, Democrats rejected an amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn, (R-Okla.), barring federal purchases of Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs for sex offenders. Coburn said it would save millions of dollars, while Sen. Max Baucus, on the bill's floor manager called it "a crass political stunt."