The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Overcoming a final procedural hurdle, Senate Democrats cleared the way for Christmas Eve passage of a landmark health care bill that would provide coverage to more than 30 million people and begin a far-reaching overhaul of Medicare and the private insurance market.
Senate Democrats turned back the third and final Republican filibuster of the $871 billion package on a 60-39 vote that came late Wednesday afternoon. Lawmakers were scheduled to return to the Capitol at 7 a.m. today for one last roll call to pass the bill.
With the outcome all but certain, Democrats have come closer than ever to realizing their 70-year-old goal of near-universal health coverage. Difficult issues must be resolved in final negotiations with the House, and those talks could stretch through January and perhaps into February, Democratic leaders said. Yet party leaders were increasingly confident that President Obama would be able to sign a bill into law in early 2010.
"Health care reform is not a matter of if," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. "Health care reform now is a matter of when."
"We stand on the doorstep of history," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said after the vote. But he declined to speculate about negotiations with the House.
"I'm not going to talk about conference. I'm talking about passing this bill," he told reporters late Wednesday. For at least a few days after Christmas, Reid said, he would rest back home in Nevada. "I am going to just sit back and watch my rabbits eat my cactus," he said.
Republicans fought the Senate bill with every parliamentary weapon they could muster, raising a series of motions on Wednesday afternoon that all failed along party lines, and the rhetoric grew more harsh as the afternoon wore on. After the Wednesday votes, Democrats sought an agreement to move up the final vote to Wednesday night, to aid lawmakers and staff trying to beat a Midwestern snowstorm. GOP senators refused the deal.
Some of the toughest criticism of the package Wednesday came from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who last summer had spent months trying to craft a bipartisan reform package with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
Grassley abandoned the quest after controversy erupted in August over the idea that Democratic bills would create "death panels," and the debate took a sharply ideological turn. The Iowa Republican said he concluded that Democrats were ceding too much authority over health care to the federal government, while failing to aggressively contain costs.
"From rationing care to infringing on the doctor-patient relationship, this government-run system will guarantee U.S. taxpayers a staggering tax burden for generations to come," Grassley said on the Senate floor. The final bill, Grassley said, "doesn't do any of these things that we set out to do at the beginning."
Republicans launched fresh lines of attack against the bill, highlighting a miscalculation by the Congressional Budget Office in predicting the bill's long-term deficit impact, and asserting that the legislation raised a series of constitutional questions.
