No Surrender

With the Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election last week, many politicians and pundits have begun to preemptively write the obituary for health care reform.

After a year of legislative wrangling, it's frustrating to watch as momentum for health care reform seems to wane. At times this whole sisyphean endeavor can seem dismaying. Seven different times, seven different Presidents have pushed this huge boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to see it roll back down again, sending us back to the beginning. I'm determined to not let this be the eighth time. As a black man, I don't want President Obama's only legacy to be that he was just the first black president.

It's necessary to pull our heads out of the daily grindings of legislative minutiae and remember why we're in this fight. There are six million uninsured Texans, living each day in fear of getting sick. There are millions more underinsured Texans that are one catastrophic illness away from being shoved off their insurance. Runaway health insurance costs are putting the hurt on budgets of families, businesses, and local and state governments.

It's beyond clear that the status quo, the system we deal with, has run amok. This is no time to shirk from the fight and kick the can down the road.

This month in Texas, enrollment in the Children's Health Insurance Program finally reached back to 500,000 after hundreds of thousands of children were slashed from the rolls by Republican lawmakers. This is the same level of enrollment that our state was at in 2003. If we're fighting in Texas to remain competitive with 2003 levels, it's clear that the governing philosophy of Governor Perry and his allies is to place the lowest possible priority on the health of their constituents.

Texas needs federal health care reform. We'll continue to fight on a state level regardless of the outcome, but we can't really win the fight against the worst practices of the insurance industry without the help of the federal government.

I'm reaching out to our members of Congress, Senators, and the White House, to urge them to press on. I encourage you to do the same. Surrender is not an option, we need to fight on.

Click here to look up your member of Congress and get their contact information.

For your reference, below is an article on the options available to Congress and the President to move forward.

---

New York Times

January 26, 2010

Decision Looms on Advancing Health Care Bill

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Seeking to avert the collapse of major health care legislation, the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress face a crucial decision about whether to use a procedural maneuver that would allow them to advance the bill despite the loss of their 60-vote majority in the Senate.

The maneuver, known as budget reconciliation, could allow President Obama and his party to muscle the legislation through Congress with a simple majority vote in the Senate. But it carries numerous risks, including the possibility of a political backlash against what Republicans would be sure to cast as parliamentary trickery.

The procedure is also subject to complex rules that could make it difficult for Democrats to include all the provisions needed to win approval of the bill, especially among rank-and-file House Democrats. For instance, it might be difficult to include provisions related to insurance coverage for abortions.

Still, for Mr. Obama, it may be the only route available to win passage of the sort of ambitious overhaul that he has pressed as his top domestic priority. And the White House and Congressional leaders have known all along that they might need to employ the tactic to finish a health bill.

“The idea that at any given time the Senate would have 60 votes was not what we would call the most ironclad assumption,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said at a news conference on Thursday. “We have always thought, what if? You know, what if the policy decisions are such that they can’t get 60 votes for it?”

Senior Congressional aides said that lawmakers and the White House were increasingly focused on a plan by which the House would adopt the health care bill approved by the Senate on Dec. 24, with any changes made in a separate bill using the budget reconciliation maneuver.

But Democratic leaders are no longer confident that rank-and-file House Democrats would be willing to go along. The victory by the Republican, Scott Brown, in Massachusetts last Tuesday not only denied Democrats their 60th vote, but raised a specter of fear for Democrats over the midterm elections.

Some Democrats said that regaining the support of the caucus could depend heavily on what Mr. Obama says in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday.

Republicans, however, have made clear that they will portray Mr. Obama and Democrats as trying to use a hardball tactic to win passage of the health care legislation.

“Less than a week after the Massachusetts special election, the Obama administration is vowing to ‘stay the course’ and double down on the same costly, job-killing policies that are leaving America’s middle-class families and small businesses high and dry,” said the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Some Democrats seem prepared to give up on a health care bill or to put it off for several weeks. Others have begun calling for a sharply scaled-back measure that they hope could win bipartisan support. But it is unclear if Republicans would cooperate even on a modest bill.

In the meantime, aides have been trying to devise a process by which the Senate could make changes to its health bill on a reconciliation measure even before the House voted on the Senate-passed health bill. Some lawmakers said House Democrats might have to vote first.

The House could approve the Senate bill and send it directly to Mr. Obama, eliminating the need for any more votes. But House Democrats have refused to do so because they oppose numerous provisions in the Senate measure, including one that provided extra federal aid solely for Nebraska.

Some House Democrats have also voiced opposition to an deal that the White House and labor unions reached on a proposed tax on high-cost, employer-sponsored insurance plans.

Passing even a modest reconciliation bill to make changes to the Senate health measure would not be easy. The mere mention of reconciliation infuriates many Republicans, even though they occasionally used the tactic when they were in the majority.

At least one Democrat who opposed the maneuver earlier in the heath care debate, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said he could go along with its limited use, depending on the specific changes to the health bill.

“If you had another one of the bills that’s in play pass and then you used reconciliation to improve it, to fix it, that’s certainly possible,” Mr. Conrad said. “But it’s important to understand the limitations of reconciliation.”

Mr. Conrad said provisions could be stricken from the measure if they were judged not to have direct budgetary impact, potentially limiting the scope of the legislation.

Mr. Conrad said he was not concerned about the likely Republican accusations of trickery. “They are going to say that, whatever,” he said.

The senior Republican on the Budget Committee, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said Democrats would have trouble executing their strategy. “It would be a very hard lift,” Mr. Gregg said. “We would make it an extraordinarily difficult exercise.”

Democrats positioned themselves to potentially use reconciliation by including a provision for it in last year’s budget.

Under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, reconciliation bills were given special Senate protection and allowed to pass by simple majority votes, after limited debate, to let senators make the tough decisions required to cut the deficit.

But Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and a longtime defender of Senate precedents, created complex rules to deter lawmakers from using reconciliation to make new policy rather than to achieve budget savings.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.