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Dec 20
2009
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The final hours of Senate debate on health carePosted by: Thomas Peters in Tagged in: live blogging , health care
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I'm watching C-SPAN during the final hours of the debate which is proceeding Senator Reid's motion to end debate on his health care bill.
Here is a recap of what's happened so far this weekend, from the Associated Press:
Senate Democrats confidently advanced heath care legislation Sunday toward a make-or-break test vote in a push for Christmas-week passage. Republicans vowed to resist what they appeared unable to stop.
... Under Senate rules, Democrats needed 60 votes on three separate occasions to pass the measure. The first and most critical test was set for about 1 a.m. Monday. Democrats said Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's announcement Saturday that he would vote for the bill gave them the support they needed.
Politico's Carrie Brown says that Nelson's "health deal hinged on abortion."
It also involved money - and a lot of it - promised to Nelson's state of Nebraska:
[Nelson] won an agreement that the federal government will forever pick up Nebraska’s share of a proposed Medicaid expansion, a deal worth about $100 million in the first decade, according to a Senate aide. He carved Nebraska’s non-profit insurers out of a proposed industry tax.
And he built new restrictions on federal financing of abortions into the bill, infuriating groups on both sides of the emotional issue and almost certainly touching off a withering fight over the limits when House and Senate Democrats hash out a final compromise.
A second Politico article says that health plans are on a "collision course" (presuming that Reid's bill makes it out of the Senate) once the debate shifts to reconciling the Senate version with the one passed by Democrats in the House.
update - the Senate ended debate and passed the bill on a party line vote of 60-40.





