Health care bill and Christmas passage

Health care bill latest news updates :- Legislation to enact President Barack Obama’s top domestic goal, remaking US health care, cleared Tuesday a new Senate procedural hurdle and stayed on track for Christmas passage.

The early morning vote came one day after the sweeping bill overcame its main challenge and won exactly the 60 votes necessary to end debate and set the stage for a final ballot on Christmas Eve.

Tuesday’s vote followed a similar pattern with all 58 Democrats and two independents in favor and 39 Republicans against. The bill faces another procedural vote on Wednesday before its expected passage on Christmas Eve.

Obama praised his Democratic allies for sealing “a big victory for the American people” after the all-important vote on Monday that he said “knocked down” a Republican effort to doom the bill.

“The Senate has moved us closer to reform that makes a tremendous difference for families, for seniors, for businesses, and for the country as a whole,” the president said in remarks at the White House.

The measure also won the support of the influential American Medical Association (AMA), which represents the interests of nearly a quarter-million US doctors.

“America has the best health care in the world — if you can get it — but for far too many people, access to care is out of reach,” said Doctor Cecil Wilson, the organization’s president elect.

Republicans vowed to fight the legislation every step of the way and, unable to bring parliamentary delaying tactics to bear against the 60-vote Democratic majority, seemed to pin their hopes on a collapse when the Senate and House of Representatives try to negotiate a compromise plan to send to Obama.

Democrats hope the Senate and the House, which passed its version November 7, will agree quickly enough to enable the president to sign the most sweeping overhaul of its kind in four decades before his State of the Union speech in late January or early February.

But Democrats who control both chambers are at odds over tough new curbs on federal monies going to pay for abortions and the Senate’s decision to strip out a government-backed “public option” to compete with private insurers.

There are other rifts — and centrist Senate Democrats who rallied behind the bill at the last minute have warned they will help kill the bill if the House-Senate “conference” makes major changes to the legislation they shaped.

“The House of Representatives will have to basically back down on virtually everything they passed for this to become law. It will be interesting to see whether there’s any institutional pride over there,” said Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Asked about the likely difficulty of agreeing on a final bill, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters “we’ll worry about the next steps at a later time.”

Monday, Obama sought to refute a key Republican argument, saying his critics’ frequent charge that the measure will further inflate the ballooning US budget deficit, swelling the country’s debt, “does not hold water.”

Obama pointed to estimates from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found the bill would reduce the deficit by 132 billion dollars over the first 10 years and as much as 1.3 trillion in the next 10.

The minority party vows to make their opposition to the measure a rallying cry in next year’s political campaign ahead of mid-term elections in November.

“We have just begun to fight,” said Republican Senator John McCain, Obama’s defeated rival for the White House in 2008.

Public support for the health care reform bill remains soft among US voters by 53 percent to 36 percent among those who say they “mostly disapprove” of the plan, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.

Although dislike of the plan as a whole remains, voters voiced support by similar margins — 56 to 38 percent — for the government-run “public option” that was stripped from the Senate bill, but which remains in the House version.

The United States is the world’s richest nation but the only industrialized democracy that does not provide health care coverage to all of its citizens.

Washington spends more than double the amounts Britain, France and Germany do per person on health care, but lags behind other countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

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Health care bill and Christmas passage was first posted on December 23, 2009 at 12:43 am.