Push for ACA fix derailed over abortion
Negotiations end with bitter charges of each side playing politics
WASHINGTON – Months of health insurance negotiations led by two senators with a track record of producing bipartisan bills ended last week amid a flurry of finger-pointing and bitter charges by each side that the other was playing politics.
It wasn’t disagreements over health care subsidies or how to insure the chronically ill that terminated the discussions. It was the messy politics of abortion.
“I’m disappointed — I’m angry,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said Friday a few hours after Democrats blocked efforts to attach health insurance legislation to a $1.3 trillion spending bill.
Alexander described the past seven months of talks with Democrats and their lead negotiator, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, as “the most frustrating and disappointing time in my 16 years in the Senate.”
Murray said she’s “extremely disappointed we’ve reached this point,” but “it does not mean I’m giving up on getting this done.”
For thousands of Americans, the breakdown could mean higher insurance rates this fall. Unless Congress acts, premiums could jump by as much as 40% in October for people who buy their insurance on the individual market instead of getting it through their employer or from a government program, according to an analysis by health care experts at the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
Alexander, who chairs the Senate committee with jurisdiction over health insurance, said he sees no way to avoid the premium increases.
Alexander and Murray have a history of working harmoniously — and finding common ground — on other tough issues. Three years ago, they successfully pushed a bipartisan rewrite of the No Child Left Behind school law. The next year, they again joined forces to pass a bipartisan bill to help accelerate the discovery, development and delivery of innovative medical treatments for diseases such as cancer and AIDS.
This time, the stumbling block was a ban on federal funding of abortions. Since 1976, the use of federal tax dollars to pay for abortions has been barred, except for limited exceptions, under a law called the Hyde amendment.
Murray and other Democrats say the bipartisan negotiations on health insurance were upended when Alexander surprised them at the last minute by insisting that the Hyde amendment restrictions must be applied to any health insurance legislation.
Alexander said he told Democrats all along that he intended to ask that the health insurance proposal be included in the must-pass spending bill and that the Hyde restrictions would apply.