By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — As House and Senate leaders prepared to hammer out a common health care bill, Sen. Blanche Lincoln said today a key deal that clinched passage of the Senate version should not be part of the final package.
Lincoln, D-Ark., said while budgeting is a negotiating process and fair game for everybody, such bartering should have no place in critical policy-making.
“The people of Arkansas did not send me to Washington to be a horse trader. They sent me there to work hard to get good policy,” the senator told reporters here today.
Senate Democratic leaders acceded to several members’ demands to garner the 60 votes necessary to thwart a Republican filibuster and pass a Senate health care reform bill on Christmas Eve.
The last Senate holdout, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, gave his support only after a number of concessions, including securing federal funding for his state to extend Medicaid coverage. Though all states would be required to do so, only Nebraska would not have to pick up the tab for the additional cost after 2016.
Thirteen state attorneys general, not including Arkansas’, have threatened to file a lawsuit unless Nelson’s political deal is removed from the legislation.
Lincoln, who has been criticized in some quarters for not winning concessions for Arkansas despite being a central figure in the Democrats’ search for consensus, said Tuesday she wants the Nelson Medicaid provision dropped from any House-Senate compromise.
“In this circumstance, it’s obviously Medicaid dollars, which usually come in a formula-based system down to states. It’s very complicated, it’s very difficult and it’s something that I think everyone needs to adhere to,” Lincoln said. “We’ll see what happens, whether it comes out or not. I think it’s appropriate that it should.”
The senator did not suggest she would withhold support if the deal holds up.
Lincoln again criticized Nelson’s deal in a talk today to the Downtown Kiwanis Club in Little Rock.
“What he got was that the feds would pay for the increased amount of Medicaid for the full 10 years,” she told the Kiwanians. “The rest of us only get the federal (government) paying for the first three years at 100 percent and then the next two years after that at 95 percent, so he got an additional five years of 100 percent of federal payment on his Medicaid, and I don’t think that was right.”
Lincoln made her comments as congressional leaders prepared to huddle with President Obama later today at the White House to lay the groundwork for resolving thorny differences between versions of health care reform passed by the House and Senate.
Among those differences are provisions on illegal immigration and abortion, the government-run insurance option passed by the House but omitted by the Senate and the size and extent of federal subsidies to help lower-income families afford coverage.
