Schumer heals splits on health bill
But liberals attack role of state's senior senator in shaping compromises.
Published: January 13, 2010, 2:20 pm
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WASHINGTON — If politics is the art of compromise, then the Senate's weeks-long debate over health care reform proved Sen. Charles E. Schumer to be one of the world's great artists.
But liberals don't see the bill that he helped to craft as a work of art.
To help lock down the 60 votes needed for the bill's passage last week, Schumer — the leading proponent of the "public option" government health plan for the uninsured — had to concede to dropping that provision from the bill.
Schumer, the author of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, then negotiated a compromise with a pro-life senator that would complicate getting insurance that covers abortion.
And striking that deal might just have been easier because, a few weeks earlier, Schumer, author of the Brady Bill handgun law and now-defunct assault weapons ban, went on his first hunting trip with that anti-abortion senator.
Some liberals are aghast at all the compromise, saying the bill the Senate passed sacrificed so many Democratic principles that it belongs on a bonfire.
"It's time that we draw the line on this weak bill and ask the Senate to go back to the drawing board," Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-Fairport, said in a CNN commentary shortly before the bill passed week. "The American people deserve at least that."
But Schumer, D-N.Y., said the bill's core — providing health insurance to at least 30 million more Americans while lowering costs — remains intact.
That, he said, was well worth all the compromise.
"If we can get our budget deficit down — and health care costs are the No. 1 cause of it — we will put our country back on track," he said in an interview. "Taxes will get lower again; we will have money for other things we need. I believe in keeping America No. 1, and I think this bill will help do it."
Public option conundrum
Schumer, who ranks third in the
Senate leadership, was intimately involved in crafting the final bill.
He offered a compromise on the public option, which Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., incorporated into the bill presented to the Senate, only to run up against political reality.
Reid and Schumer could not get all 60 members of the Democratic caucus to agree to vote for the bill if it included the public option: a new government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers to enroll the newly insured.
"A few got cold feet," he said of the moderate and conservative Democrats who refused to back the public option. "There were a lot of mistruths spread about this public option, that it was a huge government program, which it wasn't. So we then had to drop it."
Schumer, nevertheless, stressed that the goal of the public option — keeping health care costs down — can be met in other ways.
The bill, for example, would limit insurance industry administrative costs at 15 percent of every claim, thereby forcing insurers to cut down on waste. It also includes a series of experiments to find ways to lower costs, such as computerizing health records.
"The public option would have been a great way to go," Schumer said. "But there are lots of other things in the bill to get the costs down."
That's not how Slaughter sees things.
"By eliminating the public option, the government program that could spark competition within the health insurance industry, the Senate has ended up with a bill that isn't worthy of its support," wrote Slaughter, a strong proponent of the House-passed version of health care reform, which includes such a public health plan.
A House-Senate conference committee now will work on merging the two bills.
Schumer also found himself forced to compromise on another provision important to Slaughter: the part of the bill dealing with abortion.
Abortion coverage debate
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., withheld
support until he won additional aid for his home state — and until he felt comfortable
that the "exchanges," through which many of the currently uninsured would obtain insurance,
would not encourage abortion coverage.
Negotiations involving Nelson, Reid, Schumer and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., consumed 14 hours on Dec. 18.
Those senators finally agreed to a compromise Nelson proposed, which would allow states to decide whether health plans in those new insurance marketplaces could offer abortion coverage. Plans that cover abortion would be required to collect separate premiums from individuals for such coverage, ensuring that federal dollars would not finance the procedure.
That compromise met with anger from both sides of the abortion debate.
Nelson, a longtime abortion opponent, said the reaction of anti-abortion groups made him feel as if he had been bitten by the family dog, the Associated Press reported.
And Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said: "It is inexplicable that a bill seeking to expand health coverage for Americans would impose such great administrative burdens on women who purchase abortion coverage and plans that offer it."
Schumer, long one of the strongest congressional supporters of abortion rights, saw things differently. "What we tried to do here is to keep present law," a ban on federal abortion funding called the Hyde amendment, Schumer said. "Present law is Hyde, which is no government dollars. And that's what we kept in the bill."
Just as Nelson won several other provisions helpful to his home state, so did Schumer.
Federal subsidies for New York's Medicare Advantage plans — which serve more than half the Erie County senior citizens on Medicare — would not be cut for those now in the program, although subsidies for new enrollees would be lower.
Funding for New York's teaching hospitals also would not be cut. The bill, likewise, would ensure that counties receive their fair share of Medicaid funding and that it not be hoarded by the state government.
The price of all of that was Schumer's willingness to give on other issues that were important to him — which he was perfectly willing to do.
"If you think you have a monopoly on what's right, and only you know, you should be on a high horse, on a white horse, but not a legislator," Schumer said. "To get things done for the people of New York, sometimes you have to compromise a little bit."
Pheasant hunting trip
Perhaps Schumer's most surprising
compromise came in November, when Nelson took Washington's foremost gun control lawmaker
hunting in Nebraska.
The two senators have been close ever since Schumer persuaded Nelson to run for re-election in 2006, and their friendship led Reid to make sure Schumer had a key role in negotiating with the famously independent lawmaker from the Cornhusker State.
Schumer acknowledged that their friendship mattered as he helped persuade Nelson to become the crucial 60th senator to support health care reform Ô even though the two senators never discussed the issue on their hunting trip.
"We had so much fun," Schumer said, although it was surely less fun for the three pheasants he shot.
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