Fact-checking the GOP on healthcare reform

Senate Dems adopted 161 amendments and key GOP planks while soft-pedaling the public option. That's not compromise?

By Ethan Sherwood Strauss
Salon.com
Feb. 24, 2010

As the healthcare reform bill waddles toward reconciliation -- a maneuver that would let the Senate pass certain budget-related provisions with "only" a majority vote -- Republicans are complaining, louder than ever, about being excluded from Democrats' efforts to craft legislation. And some in the media are buying it.

Newsweek gave voice to GOP grievances in a piece titled "How the GOP Sees It." It begins with this John Boehner lament: "We've offered to work with the president all year. We've been shut out, shut out, and shut out." Newsweek characterizes the minority party's point of view this way: "Republicans want to help the president succeed, but he won't let them."

Almost no one is noting the extraordinary influence Republicans had on the healthcare reform bill crafted by the Senate, as it made its way through the committee process last year. The bill approved by Sen. Christopher Dodd's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, for instance, included 161 amendments authored by Republicans. Only 49 Republican amendments were rejected out of 210 considered. Yet the bill got zero Republican votes when it passed out of the committee.

You'll all remember the Senate Finance Committee process, chaired by Montana Sen. Max Baucus. Baucus and President Obama empowered a bipartisan "Gang of Six" from the committee, three Democrats and three Republicans, and they spent the summer locked in negotiations that, again, never produced one Republican vote for the bill in committee. The Finance Committee ultimately scuttled the public option in its version of the bill, looking for GOP (and conservative Democratic) support.

(More here.)