First Senate Health Care Vote Flops

[HBarlow]

"The Heritage Foundation"

October 23, 2009 | By Amanda Reinecker
First Senate health care vote flops

President Obama has repeatedly claimed that America is closer to passing health care reform than ever before. But proponents of big-government health care nevertheless suffered a major setback on Wednesday when the first Senate floor vote on health care legislation failed with only 47 votes in favor.

Senators voted not to act on a $247 billion "doctors' fix" that would have blocked scheduled costs savings in Medicare. This legislation is formally separate from the health care "reform" proposal, but it's nonetheless an integral part of the overall package, so its defeat is telling.

The vote, which Heritage Foundation expert Brian Darling dubs "round 1 of the battle over Obamacare," represents a major victory for conservatives who, from the beginning, have argued that real reform should be principled, fiscally responsible and bipartisan.

Detaching this legislation from the broader health care reform bill was part of a White House "strategy to smooth passage of President Barack Obama's $1 trillion-plus health care overhaul by transferring a quarter of its cost into a separate, and completely unpaid for, bill," explains Heritage's Conn Carroll in The Morning Bell.

Every Republican Senator and 13 fiscally-conscious Democrats (including Connecticut's Joe Lieberman) saw through this "transparently dishonest shell game" and voted down the measure.

A long history shows that promised Medicare cuts -- an effort to control runaway spending on the entitlement program -- rarely come to fruition. The cuts are either frozen or, when implemented, are undone after the fact. And, as in this case, lawmakers rarely offset the cost of the restored Medicare spending with cuts elsewhere, which simply adds to the budget deficit.

"The moment this became a fiscal and moral gut check, the people prevailed and the special interests lost," writes Heritage Vice President Michael Franc on National Review Online.

This was the first real demonstration of bipartisanship in the health care debate, and the Left lost. "A bipartisan majority rejected the Democrat leadership's attempt to add another quarter-trillion dollars to the national credit card without any plan to pay for it," McConnell said. "With a record deficit and a ballooning national debt, the American people are saying enough is enough."