A plethora of Congressmen and women bombarded the television airwaves on Sunday to dissect the $848 billion health care reform legislation that (barely) passed the Senate Saturday night.
The challenges facing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are formidable. They were leading up to this past weekend's vote, which was simply to allow debate to continue on the legislation. Most egregious was Reid inserting a Medicaid spending provision in Louisiana to buy, er , win over Senator Mary Landrieu's support.
On ABC's "This Week", Nebraska's Ben Nelson said if the vote Saturday was on the real deal, he would have voted no. "I would have voted not to end debate. I would have voted no on a cloture vote to end debate. I would not let it get off the floor."
Count Nelson as among those from both parties who says the bill doesn't do enough to control health insurance costs.
Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn said on "This Week" that the bill "treats the symptoms, not the disease. This is malpractice," he said, "We're not addressing the costs."
Coburn, an MD himself, asked, "Why do we have an imbalance of primary care physicians? Because we pay them 300% lower than specialists. One in fifty doctors decide to go into primary care…that's a disaster."
Speaking up for the bill was South Florida Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who in her relatively short time in Congress (she's serving her 3rd term) has become the most called upon Florida legislator on the national talk show circuit, because she's extremely effective in getting her (and the party's) message across.
Wasserman Schultz got into a verbal back and forth with her GOP colleague, Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn on "This Week", accusing her and the GOP of politicizing breast cancer.
Blackburn had said that the controversial breast cancer screening guidelines announced last week were an example of how the Democrats would ration health care, and quoted a specific section of the House bill ("Go to page 1296, in Title III, on Preventive Wellness service….")
Wasserman Schultz came right back, saying, " "The task force language in that bill actually makes sure that prevention services like mammograms and colonoscopies would be free."
See the exchange:
Wasserman Schultz is a breast cancer survivor, and last week she was as critical as anyone in Congress on the recommendations that women in their 40s don't need routine mammograms, calling them "disturbing" and "ludicrous." The result she said, would be that "more women in that age range will die."
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.