Obama backs Medicare deal, pressuring Senate

The $200 billion Medicare bill backed by House leaders from both parties won a key endorsement Wednesday from President Obama, leaving supporters hopeful that Senate Democrats will warm to the deal.

In his first public remarks on the package unveiled Tuesday, Obama said he has his “pen ready” to sign the bipartisan House bill that would repeal automatic cuts to doctor payments under Medicare.

{mosads}The strong support from Obama is good news for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who have spent weeks negotiating the deal.

It also puts new pressure on Senate Democrats, who have mostly withheld support.

The bill is expected to easily clear the House on Thursday, which would force the Senate to act before Friday if it hopes to avert the latest round of doctor payment cuts before Congress’s two-week recess.

Congress must make a move on Medicare’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) before March 31 or doctors will face double-digit payment cuts.

The tight timeline is making some lawmakers nervous. The second-ranking Senate Republican, Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), told reporters Tuesday that another short-term “patch” may be necessary, though Boehner ruled out such a route.

“I should make clear that we have no intentions of passing any kind of a short-term doc-fix,” Boehner also said Tuesday. “We’ve got a good product, we’re going to pass it here on Thursday, and I hope the Senate will move as quickly as possible.”  

There were some signs on Wednesday that resistance among Senate Democrats was softening. Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), for example, offered support for the first time.

But some holdouts, such as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), remain. They object that the package would only extend a children’s health program for two years, and they say it would expand a prohibition on the use of federal funds for abortion at community health centers. That charge is rejected by Pelosi, who has noted that federal funding under ObamaCare for community health centers is already prohibited from being used for abortions.

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been quiet about the bill, other senior GOP lawmakers, including Cornyn, have voiced support. Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) touted Obama’s endorsement as an “encouraging” sign for the bill’s passage.

Pressure is mounting on the Democrats, who have seen a flood of groups endorsing the bill, from the American Hospital Association to the Center for American Progress.

Even as Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) continued to raise concerns about the bill this week, some tried to clarify that their opposition against some pieces of the House deal doesn’t equate to a “no” vote.

If Senate Democrats oppose the deal, it would put them in a rare position of standing against Obama. They would also risk appearing as the root of congressional gridlock that they had long sought to blame on the GOP.

“I haven’t heard anybody say, ‘Absolutely, no, no, no, I’m not going to vote for it. It’s, ‘We have some concerns. Here are things we want to understand.’ It’s not absolute,” a Senate Democratic aide said Wednesday.

Many Democratic senators — including Reid — have declined to give their position on the bill. Reid said Tuesday that he would wait to see the final bill from the House.

Hatch, a firm supporter of the SGR deal, dismissed some of the chambers’ concerns as “straw-man arguments.”

“I’ve been around long enough to know that anyone who waits around for the perfect bill better be prepared to wait for a very, very long time,” Hatch said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

One of the Senate’s remaining holdouts against the current deal, Murphy said Wednesday that he still believed it should include four years of funding for the children’s health program.

“My position remains that two years is too short,” Murphy, a member of the Senate Health Committee, told The Hill on Wednesday. The Connecticut senator said Obama’s endorsement did not necessarily mean that he would soften his stance, though he did not specifically say whether he planned to vote against the bill.

“Many of us have made our position clear that we want more than two years. We’ll wait to see what we get from the House,” he said.

The Obama administration on Wednesday cast the bill as imperfect, but a step forward.

“This bill is not exactly the way the president would have written it,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday. “But it does reflect a reasonable compromise where both sides sought to find common ground.”