After Harry Reid told
Max Baucus that taxing employer-provided health benefits was off
the table because of a lack of votes, the Senate Finance
committee is now scrambling to figure out new ways to pay for the
$1 trillion-plus cost of health care legislation. President
Obama's idea -- to limit the charity tax deduction for
high-income individiuals -- has also been unpopular on the Hill.
This is another indication that Democrats' timeline to get health
care bills passed in the House and Senate before the August
recess is looking increasingly unrealistic. Keep in mind that
under the original schedule, the Finance committee was supposed
to begin marking up, or rewriting, legislation the week of June
22. That date got pushed back to this week after the CBO put the
price tag of a draft of the Finance committee bill at $1.6
trillion and Baucus sought to chop it down. Yet here we are, and
Democrats are still looking for ways to pay for the legislation.
Obviously, this setback on the financing front will push the
timeline back even further. And remember, even when the Finance
committee comes up with a draft of the bill, it still has to go
through the markup process, and then be reconciled with the much
more liberal bill coming out of the Senate Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions committtee. Budget committee chairman Kent
Conrad sounds like a Republican when he says, as quoted by the
Politico: "The important thing is to get it right, not
to get stuck on some specific day or some specific week." And as
I've noting,
time is the Democrats' enemy. It's no wonder that liberal health
care journalist Jonathan Cohn is
concerned.
