To: Bill who wrote (766670 ) 1/29/2014 11:51:32 AM From: combjelly Read Replies (2) | Respond to Obama did not try to get bipartisan support for the ACA. [70] [71] By July, a series of bills were approved by committees within the House of Representatives . [72] On the Senate side, from June to September, the Senate Finance Committee held a series of 31 meetings to develop a healthcare reform bill. This group — in particular, Democrats Max Baucus , Jeff Bingaman , and Kent Conrad , and Republicans Mike Enzi , Chuck Grassley , and Olympia Snowe — met for more than 60 hours, and the principles that they discussed, in conjunction with the other committees, became the foundation of the Senate's healthcare reform bill. [73] [74] [75] universal healthcare as one of the stated goals of the Obama administration, congressional Democrats and health policy experts like Jonathan Gruber and David Cutler argued that guaranteed issue would require both community rating and an individual mandate to ensure that adverse selection and/or "free riding" would not result in an insurance "death spiral" ; [76] they convinced Obama that this was necessary, and persuaded him to accept congressional proposals that included a mandate. [77] This approach was taken because the president and congressional leaders had concluded that more progressive plans, such as the (single-payer) Medicare for All act , could not obtain filibuster-proof support in the Senate. By deliberately drawing on bipartisan ideas — the same basic outline was supported by former Senate majority leaders Howard Baker , Bob Dole , Tom Daschle and George J. Mitchell —the bill's drafters hoped to increase the chances of garnering the necessary votes for passage. [78] [79] en.wikipedia.org
