At a quarter till midnight last Friday, with a deal to avert a government shutdown barely an hour old, senator Harry Reid phoned a fellow Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, at home and startled him with some bad news. ?You lost free-choice vouchers,? Wyden recalls Reid telling him.
Even delivered in shorthand, the call?s meaning was clear to Wyden: a health care plan he had succeeded in getting passed months earlier despite furious lobbying by big business and labour had been pulled out of the blue and killed as part of the broader budget deal struck between the White House and Congress. What was most perplexing was that it had little to do with budgets or government shutdowns.
?I was flabbergasted, just flabbergasted,? Wyden, of Oregon, said on Tuesday in an interview, describing the demise of a plan that would have allowed some 300,000 workers to pick their own insurance coverage through employer-financed vouchers.
With $38 billion in cuts on the line in a $3.5 trillion budget, the clash over federal spending played out in numbers so big that most standard calculators had trouble tracking all the zeros. But in the end, a handful of relatively small-bore line items affecting particular industries attracted some of the most aggressive lobbying behind the scenes, as business interests, health care providers and others fought to hold on to, or kill, proposals that affected their bottom line.
Much public attention focused on the social issues that appeared in the spending bill in the final weeks as social conservatives tried to use it to advance their causes, particularly the unsuccessful effort by abortion opponents to cut the financing of Planned Parenthood. In the end, the budget agreement reached late Friday night banned the District of Columbia from using its own money to provide abortions for low-income women in the city ? a measure with a bigger social impact than fiscal.
But there was also intense but ultimately unsuccessful lobbying by General Electric and other military contractors to revive financing for an alternate engine for a costly jet fighter project. Proponents of tougher regulations for the politically influential and beleaguered commercial college industry succeeded, for now, in beating back an effort to block restrictions on how the schools get federal aid.
An analysis by the Congressional budget office found that the Wyden proposal had no short-term impact on federal spending and could actually save money over the next four years.
The plan to allow some employees to ?opt out? of their employer-sponsored plans and choose their own coverage drew opposition from an unusual alliance of unions and businesses. Supporters said the vouchers would give employees more options and spur competition in the marketplace. Critics contended that younger, healthier employees would leave the plans and make insurance costlier for older, less healthy workers.
So who axed the programme? ?I wish I knew,? Wyden said. ?Everyone at the table says that someone else brought it up. They all say, ?It wasn?t me.???
Democrats and administration officials insisted Tuesday in interviews that Republican leaders had moved to get rid of the Wyden plan. They acknowledge privately that were not in a position to fight it that aggressively, given that it was opposed by business and labor, and that agreeing to kill the plan was seen as a way of staving off other possible cuts in health care financing.
