Pelosi vows to defend House healthcare bill

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday told her
caucus she would not let the House be forced into signing off on the Senate’s
healthcare bill.

Pelosi spent two hours addressing her caucus via
conference call on Thursday for the first time since she agreed to let the
Senate bill serve as the vehicle for delivering a congressional health reform
bill to the White House.

But Pelosi insisted from the onset that the House would
not simply accept the Senate bill, despite the extremely fragile coalition that
allowed a bill to emerge from the Senate.

{mosads}“She answered questions about whether the White House
wants just the Senate bill,” a senior Democratic aide said after the call. “The
Speaker said that is not going to happen. We are going to negotiate
a final bill.”

For the next two hours, Pelosi and other Democratic
leaders fielded questions about the areas in which the Senate bill differs
substantially from the healthcare bill Pelosi steered through the House in
November.

From language that bars federal dollars from covering
abortion procedures to how to raise taxes to fund health insurance expansion to
the very mechanisms designed to make such insurance more accessible, the House
and Senate bills present leaders with significant political and substantive
gaps to bridge.

Pelosi took no policy stances beyond those she has made
publicly, aides and sources on the call said. She declared earlier this week
that a final bill must only meet her “AAA” affordability, accountability and
accessibility test. 

Instead, she and other House leaders used Thursday’s call
to lay out all of the issues that must be addressed, and to let members air
their concerns about Senate provisions that are gaining momentum, including a
state-based public insurance exchange, rather than a national, government-run
“public option” like the one written into the House bill.

A so-called “public option” is seen as having almost zero
chance of surviving in Senate.

At the same time, Pelosi told House liberals that the
public option was still among the items under consideration by House, Senate
and White House policy staff working on merging the two bills.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the House
Progressive Caucus, said she came away with the assurance that the public
option was “still part of the discussion.”

“For a number of people, it was important to have the
public option discussed,” Schakowsky said after calling in from her congressional office in Washington. “There’s a sense of satisfaction that the
things we worked so hard for in the House bill are still part of the
discussion.”

Schakowsky said there were no ultimatums offered on the
public option or other issues.

She and other Democrats described the tone of the call as
patient, probative and cordial — a stark departure from where House Democrats
were a month-and-a-half ago.

“This wasn’t about people showing signs or their cards or
their positions or anything else,” Education and Labor Chairman George Miller
(D-Calif.) said. “It was just a conversation. It wasn’t about trying
to ferret out people’s concessions or positions.”

House Democrats will caucus again on Tuesday, and on
Wednesday they begin their three-day “Issues Conference,” where they will hear
from Obama directly.

Many members are awaiting guidance from the president, and
there is a hope that he will help the two chambers clear their remaining
hurdles.

Talk of meeting in the middle on certain areas was already
permeating some of the policy discussions on Thursday.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), who chairs the health
subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the taxes issue
could be resolved by simply splitting the difference between the two
chambers. 

The House would raise the bulk of its funding from an
income surtax on high-income earners. The Senate-passed bill would levy an
excess tax on high-cost, “Cadillac” health insurance plans, which
labor unions and many House Democrats oppose, along with an increase in the
Medicare payroll tax on the upper-income bracket. “Those three things
could be in play in some way to achieve the pay-for,” he said.

“We prefer the millionaire tax,” Pallone said.
“The president has always been in favor of the excise tax, and the
question is whether or not it’s in there or it’s pared down in some way and
replaced in part with some of the House pay-fors, particularly the
surcharge.” The Medicare payroll tax increase, he said, is “similar
to the surcharge so there might be some way to work with that so that the senators
go along in some way with what we have in mind with the surcharge on upper
income.”