Written by Edward Lee Pitts
The Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote this week on their version of healthcare reform. If you’ve got nothing better to do today then feel free to read the bill’s full text: here. The cliff notes version is that most conservatives won’t like what it has to offer. After a week that saw senators blow through 564 amendments, lawmakers made few changes on the bill that pleased Republicans. Lawmakers did tweak the bill in cosmetic ways: exempting about 2 million people from having to obey the insurance mandate, reducing the top penalty for failure to buy insurance to $1,900 and defeating an official government-run public insurance plan.
But for social conservatives the news was the same: like in other congressional healthcare bills, senators defeated amendments that would have barred taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortions and that would have prohibited the government from forcing health providers, such as hospitals and physicians, to provide abortions.
“The American people do not want, and should not be expected, to foot the bill for abortions,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who sponsored the amendments. “I will fight tooth and nail to make sure once this bill gets to the floor it is clear in the language that taxpayers’ dollars will not be used to fund abortions.”
The bill is expected to pass the committee this week and go before the full Senate this month where it will be merged with an even more liberal version from the main Senate committee on health. But before this week’s vote the Congressional Budget Office is expected to release its estimate of how much this bill will cost. Republicans hope a high estimate will slow down the healthcare reform train.
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