By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said today she will offer amendments to a health care reform proposal by the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but she declined to say what changes she will offer.
“I certainly will have the opportunity to offer amendments” to the proposal by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., Lincoln, a member of the Finance Committee, said in a conference call with reporters. “We’re still working on our amendments, and until we’ve got them completed I’m reluctant to go into too much detail.”
Daucus’ long-delayed legislation would require almost everyone to buy insurance and make insurance companies cover people with pre-existing medical conditions, while purporting to rein in spiraling health care costs.
But some Senate Democrats complained that Baucus would pay the 10-year, $856 billion price tag by taxing high-value insurance packages that the senator called “Cadillac plans.” Some worried that the levy would gouge the pockets of middle-class Americans.
Lincoln declined to name anything she did not like in the proposal but said there is much she does like.
“I am pleased that many of my priorities have been included. This is a deficit-neutral bill that will curb health care costs down the road, and it preserves the current employer-provided health care system,” she said.
Lincoln said the proposal would create state-based exchanges — an idea she said was taken from legislation she sponsored earlier this year — which would allow small businesses and self-employed people to shop for an insurance plan.
Small businesses and the self-employed would be eligible for a tax credit as an incentive to join the exchanges and offer affordable plans, she said.
In addition to banning exclusion because of pre-existing conditions, the measure would prohibit annual and lifetime caps on coverage, Lincoln said.
Though the plan would require more people to be covered, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated it would reduce federal deficits by $49 billion between 2010 and 2019. The bill would reduce inefficiencies and abuses of the system, Lincoln said.
“There’s a whole list of approaches that we take to try and make that happen, everything from value-based purchasing to incentivizing coordination of care, wellness and prevention, just making sure that practices and health care providers are using more up-to-date technologies,” she said.
The bill would expand Medicaid, which is partially state-funded, but Lincoln said the federal government would cover states’ costs for the first couple of years — after which the cost-saving provisions of the bill should be able to off-set the increased cost of covering more people.
The proposal does not include a government-run health insurance option, an idea that President Obama supports but Republicans and some Democrats in the Senate, including Lincoln, oppose. Despite that concession, Baucus’ plan received no Republican support when it was unveiled Wednesday.
Lincoln said Republicans and Democrats are in agreement on about 80 percent of the proposal.
“I just hope and encourage all of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to remind ourselves that we aren’t here to create a work of art. We are here to create a work in progress,” she said.
Asked if she thinks the public would accept a plan that passes with no GOP votes, she said, “I hope the public will take this bill on its face value and not based on any political posturing that people want to make.”
Lincoln also reiterated her opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act in its current form. The New York Times on Wednesday quoted Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Penn., as saying Lincoln would vote to stop a filibuster of the bill.
“I don’t know where he got that,” Lincoln said today. “I certainly haven’t spoken with Sen. Specter, and I’ve made it clear that the Employee Free Choice Act, if it were to come up, that I could not support the procedural motion to move it forward.”
——-
On the Net:
Full text of the Baucus proposal:
http://finance.senate.gov/sitepages/legislation.htm
