Word: billing
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...there had ever been any hope for a truly bipartisan health-care bill this year, it came in the person of one cantankerous and quirky Iowan. For months, much to the consternation of many of his fellow Republicans, Charles Grassley, the ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee, had continued to negotiate behind closed doors with chairman Max Baucus and four other members of the panel. No Republican received more TLC from Barack Obama, who has met with Grassley three times at the White House and called him three times more just to keep in touch. White House aides...
...interview on Sept. 1, Grassley said, "I've gotten pleadings that we're helping the Democrats get a bill." But, he insisted, "my posture has been to take to the table things that my caucus has said they want health-care reform to be or not be." Among the demands that Grassley says he has made that reflect his commitment to conservative orthodoxy: no rationing of health care, no government-run public option to compete with private insurance, no requirement that employers provide health coverage and an insistence that malpractice lawsuits be curbed...
...Hawkeye-Stubborn But if Grassley has been clear about what he doesn't want to see in a bill, Democrats have had a harder time getting a fix on what he might accept. Take his often repeated criticism of the public option: Obama expected it to come up during a private meeting with Grassley last spring and was prepared to explore a compromise, according to a source who is familiar with what happened. Instead, Grassley failed to even mention it, leaving it to Obama to bring up the matter - and his top aides to wonder what Grassley's real agenda...
...Democrats, no surprise, have different ideas. In fact, party leaders are ready to write Grassley and the Republicans out of their plans for action in September and October. "If we can't do a bipartisan bill, we can do a partisan bill," says Senate majority leader Harry Reid. That may be harder than it looks. Though Democrats control Congress, it takes 60 votes to get past a filibuster in the Senate; with the death of Ted Kennedy, they have only 59. And holding the Democrats' own ranks is getting dicier, given the sinking poll numbers for both Obama...
...There are procedural ways to get around the 60-vote hurdle, but going that route with a bill as big and complicated as health-care reform would take the Senate Democrats into dark, uncharted parliamentary territory. Among the options they are considering are cutting the bill into pieces and ultimately passing a smaller and less ambitious measure. That, however, sets up a clash with the more liberal House...