Senate Finance Committee Concludes Amendment Process

On Friday, October 2, 2009, after almost two full weeks of deliberations on amendments by the Finance Committee, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus announced that the amendment process was at an end. The revised conceptual mark of the America’s Healthy Future Act is now back at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for scoring and the Senate Finance Committee intends to meet during the week of October 5th to review the updated score and report the measure from the Committee.

Over 500 amendments were filed by Senate Finance Committee members before consideration of the measure began on September 22nd and more than 100 of those amendments were debated by the Committee. Several amendments were adopted during the markup and other amendments were incorporated as part of the revised mark considered by the Committee. Among the more controversial and important amendments were those relating to a “public option” as part of the health insurance exchange. Although amendments failed to strike the mark’s proposal for state-based cooperatives and add a public option, discussion relating to a public option are ongoing. Moreover, the reported Senate Finance Committee bill will need to be merged with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s reported bill, which includes a public option.

Senate Majority Leader Reid recently cancelled the Columbus Day recess in order to allow additional time for floor consideration of the health reform measure once the Finance and HELP bills are merged. At the same time, Speaker Pelosi has been noncommittal recently regarding floor action in the House of Representatives which may imply that chamber intends to wait for more clarity from the Senate before proceeding. The use of a parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation, which would require only 51 votes for passage of health reform in the Senate, continues to be held out as an option by Democratic Leadership.