The release of Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus‘ America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 was supposed to put the health care reform debate on the fast track as the White House and Congressional Democrats scramble to have at least a Senate bill in place by October 15th - the deadline for Harry Reid’s nuclear option of budget reconciliation. Instead a whopping 564 amendments to the bill have been filed ahead of the Finance Committee’s mark-up session which is scheduled to begin tomorrow morning.

While there is little chance the Baucus bill will come out of mark-up looking anything like the one he introduced last week, the question on the minds of most following the debate is which direction the mark-up will take the bill in. Will the resultant bill actually resemble the bipartisan approach President Obama has claimed to desire? Or, will the amendment process move the bill in the direction of the House bills which include a public option as the centerpiece of health care reform?

The amendments run the gamut and represent just how deeply divided Democrats are within their own party and how equally entrenched Republicans are against the proposed taxes and spending increases in the bill. At one end of the spectrum, you have Democrat Ben Nelson’s amendment that would scrap cooperatives as the centerpiece of the Baucus bill and replace them with the highly controversial public option. In the extreme opposite direction are multiple amendments by Chuck Grassley looking to remove tens of billions of dollars in taxes on private insurers and the rest of the health care industry. The Nelson and Grassley amendments are significant as passage would likely push the cost of a final bill over the $900 billion President Obama has set as a ceiling for reform and would result in a bill that was no longer deficit neutral - something else the President has declared a deal-breaker.

Somewhere in the middle stands Republican Olympia Snowe whose trigger amendment came as a surprise to no one but just may represent one of the best opportunities for the bill to garner the votes of moderate Republicans. Snowe has proven something of an enigma throughout the health care reform debate and her vote could play a serious role in getting a final Senate bill through a cloture vote or through reconciliation if she feels there are sufficient safeguards against a complete government takeover of the health care industry.

Tags: America's Healthy Future Act of 2009, Barack Obama, Ben Nelson, budget reconciliation, Chuck Grassley, cloture, cooperatives, deficit-neutral, Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Olympia Snowe, public-option, Senate Finance Committee, trigger

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Horserace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.