Harry Reid does his best Rodney King impression from the Senate floor.
“I want everyone within the sound of my voice to understand that Washington is being driven by a small number of people on that side of the aisle that are preventing us from doing things that help the American people,” Reid said. “We’re not trying to run over people with the 60 votes we have. We want to work with people. We want to get along.”
But Reid lost the vote on the Medicare physician fee schedule 47-53, with 13 Democrats voting against cloture. No Republicans voted with him, so isn’t a bit embarrassing for Reid to suggest that he trusted the AMA’s word that they could get twenty-seven Republican votes? He has Dick Durbin, the Majority Whip, to count votes for him. It’s especially hard to believe when we’re getting this 11-Dimensional Chess spin from The Hill:
If the Senate did not vote on the doctors’ fix this week, the aide explained, a lawmaker could offer it as an amendment to the broader healthcare bill. That would serve as a poison-pill amendment because Obama has set a $900 billion limit on healthcare reform legislation and the doctors’ fix would add hundreds of billions more to the price tag.
“If this amendment passed, it would jeopardize final passage of health reform. And given Republicans’ strong opposition to health reform, it is entirely possible they would have voted for this amendment,” said the aide.
“We have taken the steam out of this issue and defused any efforts to use this amendment to blow up healthcare,” the staffer added.
So, on the one hand, Reid argues that the Republicans are just being obstructionists, and on the other hand, he’s saying that he duped them into voting against the bill so they couldn’t vote for it as part of the health care reform bill. My understanding, though, is that Reid wanted to pass the physician fee amendment to win support for a public option tied to Medicare rates from rural Democrats who think the reimbursement rates are too low. He just wanted to pass it as a stand alone so it wouldn’t add cost to the CBO’s score of the health care bill.
So, who knows what really happened here?
