Word: gop
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...measure similar to the one Sens. Ted Kennedy, John McCain and John Edwards introduced in the Senate. In exchange, Bush aides promised to negotiate a compromise with Norwood. But while they kept Norwood closeted in endless meetings, they secretly hatched a compromise bill more to their liking with GOP Sen. Bill Frist and moderates John Breaux and Jim Jeffords. That measure channeled all suits into federal courts and limited jury awards for pain and suffering to just...
...Bush's game plan went out the window when Jeffords' defection from the GOP gave Democrats control of the Senate. Daschle ordered that the patients bill would be the next measure considered after education, not energy legislation. Norwood announced he was introducing his legislation in the House...
...Bush had another problem within his own party. A majority of the GOP's senators didn't support the patients right bill Frist had introduced. Most backed a more HMO-friendly measure Republican Whip Don Nickles had offered in the past. A week before Daschle planned to bring the Democrats' version of the patients bill to the floor, the White House still couldn't decide how it was going to attack it - whether to push for the Frist compromise measure or to side with the more partisan Nickles version. Lott was forced to stall Daschle on beginning the patients bill...
...from both plans that Republicans threw at the Democratic bill to pick it apart. Lott also tried for a while to string out debate on the measure to give attack ads aired by HMOs and health insurance companies time to soften up the Dems. The TV attack ads and GOP rhetoric zeroed in on a provision in the Kennedy-McCain-Edwards bill that allowed employers to be sued if they were directly involved in medical decisions for their workers. Republicans figured that warning about employers going out of business or canceling their health plans would draw the most blood...
...compromising on the employer provision, Daschle defanged the HMO attack ads and GOP rhetoric that the Republicans thought was their best weapon. "The danger is we made too big a deal about this," Frist says of the employer hullabaloo. "We set it up that way because we said the employers provision is the number one problem and we did pretty well on that all over the country." But Democrats gave Republicans most of what they wanted on exempting employers, creating the perception among the public that they compromised on the bill, as Bush wanted. But the Democrats didn...