Health Care Vote: Will They Or Won't They?

Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet at 8:10 AM on July 29, 2009.

As House negotiators holed up late yesterday with the seven recalcitrant Blue Dog Democrats who are holding up health care reform legislation,  someone leaked to Politico's Glenn Thrush a memo from a Republican staffer who claimed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi told staffers for House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, that there would be no vote before next week's recess on health care reform.

Confronted with the leak after she emerged from the talks, Pelosi simply said that no announcements had been made about the prospects for a vote.

Still, prospects for a House vote before the end of the week look bleak. Despite his threat to bypass his own committee in order to bring the vote to the House floor, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman continued negotiations with the Blue Dogs last night in a meeting that went for almost seven hours.

The White House even broke out the big guns: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a.k.a., The Enforcer, was reportedly in the room for three and a half hours. No deal was struck.

Meanwhile, on the Senate side, consternation is running high among Democrats upon word that the bill emerging from the Senate Finance Committee would contain no public plan for health insurance. Instead, the Finance Committee plan is said to contain a scheme for non-profit, regional insurance co-ops instead. It's hard to see how effective these co-ops would be in holding down costs, since they break the vast uninsured population into smaller pools than would a federally-administered public plan, which would spread the risk over a much larger field.

Ohio's Sherrod Brown expressed his frustration this way:

“So because we want three Republicans to come along on this, we are going to betray what the American people want? I don’t think so,” Brown said. “I think, in the end, Republicans vote for this because they want to be on the side of history. ... Just because Finance was slower doesn’t mean they are stronger, that their way, that their plan will carry the day. I don’t think it will.”

Tagged as: sherrod brown, nancy pelosi, henry waxman, rahm emanuel, health care reform, senate finance committee, john boehner

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's acting Washington bureau chief.