Feinstein's smart. She stays in the middle. Makes her tough to beat. Lindybill@grumblegrumble.com
Feinstein may back drug bill for seniors
Moderate Dems could give Bush a major victory
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Thursday, November 20, 2003
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URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/20/MNGDO368UK1.DTL
Washington -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is among a handful of moderate Democrats who are poised to vote for the Medicare prescription drug bill, potentially handing President Bush an enormous domestic policy victory heading into next year's elections.
Health care lobbyists predicted Wednesday that the highly controversial reform measure -- which would constitute the biggest expansion of Medicare since it was created in 1965 -- will pass the House and Senate by the end of this week with the aid of moderate Democrats in both chambers.
Feinstein is often a bellwether in the Senate on significant bills that aim for bipartisan support. When she said she was "inclined" to vote for the measure, most vote counters put her in the unofficial "yes" column.
"There are still a number of serious issues that need to be examined, but I am inclined to vote for it depending on how the scoring comes out," Feinstein said Wednesday. "The California medical community has lined up in favor of the measure, and for lower income people who have nothing now, it's a good bill."
Capitol Hill was engulfed in intense lobbying Wednesday as Democratic leaders struggled to rally their troops to oppose a prescription drug benefit the Bush administration considers essential to its re-election prospects. Democrats see it as the beginning of the end of one of the Great Society's most popular and enduring legacies.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco led a rally by the Alliance for Retired Americans, calling the group "the cavalry coming to storm the Hill for American seniors. ... My promise to you is Democrats will work day and night against this shameful Republican bill that you have so rightly called a lemon."
Republicans and the White House also fought to win over reluctant conservatives, sending in former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich to convince doubters that the measure contains adequate market reforms.
"The buzz this morning was they took the bait," a health care lobbyist said.
Influential conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute have been railing against the bill for months as a wrong- headed expansion of a $245 billion-a-year entitlement program that will wind up costing hundreds of billions of dollars more than advertised and fail to introduce health-care competition for seniors. The Heritage Foundation calls it an "egregiously terrible bill likely to cause irreparable harm both to Medicare and the U.S. economy."
Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, the Democratic Party's torchbearer on health care, slammed the bill Wednesday in the Senate but stopped short of a filibuster threat that could potentially kill the measure by requiring Republicans to gain a 60-vote supermajority for passage.
Kennedy called the bill "a Trojan horse to destroy the Medicare program" and an "enormous give-away to insurance companies and an enormous take-away from senior citizens."
But Democrats were fighting uphill after the powerful AARP endorsed the measure Monday and opened a $7 million advertising campaign in leading newspapers to back it, saying "The proposed prescription drug Medicare bill isn't perfect. But millions of Americans can't afford to wait for perfect."
A vote-counting lobbyist said several moderate Democrats and Republicans "have been given some backbone by the AARP endorsement."
Pelosi blasted the AARP, saying its executive director, Bill Novelli, "helped write Newt Gingrich's book on how to destroy Medicare. So take that back to your seniors."
Pelosi, along with Bay Area House Democrats Lynn Woolsey, George Miller, Pete Stark, Ellen Tauscher and Barbara Lee, joined Lois Capps of Santa Barbara,
in resigning in protest from AARP, which counts 35 million Americans older than 50 as its members.
Democrats are caught between supporting a bill that offers a long- promised prescription drug benefit but also introduces measures intended to increase private-sector competition in a program covering 40 million people, one-tenth of whom live in California.
The bill aims to provide limited drug coverage for seniors starting in 2006, including coverage of all catastrophic costs after out-of-pocket costs reach $3,600, with additional aid for low-income seniors. A drug discount card would be made available in 2004. The more controversial provisions would inject market forces to Medicare through tax-free health savings accounts and pilot projects starting in six cities in 2010 in which seniors could choose between Medicare or private health plans such as preferred provider organizations. If Medicare is more expensive than a market benchmark, seniors would pay the difference.
The two Senate Democrats who helped Republicans craft the bill, Louisiana's John Breaux and Montana's Max Baucus, argued forcefully that the result is a sound compromise and probably the last chance for Congress, after years of effort, to introduce a prescription drug benefit into Medicare, before presidential politics and future budget pressures intervene.
Feinstein said she had not definitively made up her mind and could still oppose the bill depending on a number of factors, including whether congressional budget officials estimate that its price tag goes much over the $400 billion for the next 10 years that Congress and the White House have allotted.
California Sen. Barbara Boxer also said she has not decided how to vote, but added she is concerned that the measure "begins the privatization of Medicare and in many ways its dismantling." She noted that the final bill is still not finished and could change in ways that make her more or less likely to vote for it.
But she said her preliminary estimates show it could hurt "tens of thousands of Californians," by doing such things as inducing employers to drop health care benefits for retirees, a trend already well under way.
Boxer acknowledged a political risk either way.
Supporters of the current package contend that the drug benefit would be entirely voluntary. Many Democrats hope, and Republicans suspect, that if the new benefit comes up short, future Congresses will be quick to expand it.
The risk in voting against the package, Boxer said, is "You have to say, 'I wanted a better bill,' and some people might say, 'Well Barbara, you know, you should have just done this.' '' |
