With his big health care policy victory killed in the night, Wyden likely to vote against the budget deal

Kari Chisholm

As you all know by now, budget bills - especially must-pass budget bills - can often become a vehicle for totally unrelated policy changes. The high-profile fights over defunding the non-abortion services of Planned Parenthood, for example.

But not all fights are so high profile. In fact, sometimes the policy changes that show up in must-pass budget bills are ones that are done in the dark of night - without notice to interested parties.

One such under-cover-of-night knifings happened to Senator Ron Wyden. From Eric Lichtblau at the New York Times:

At a quarter till midnight last Friday, with a deal to avert a government shutdown barely an hour old, Senator Harry Reid phoned a fellow Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, at home and startled him with some bad news. “You lost free-choice vouchers,” Mr. Wyden recalls Mr. Reid telling him.

Here's the deal: Imagine that your employer offers you a health care benefit, but the employee portion of the premium is too expensive for you, so you turn it down. Under the new health reform law, if you're below 400% of poverty and that payment is more than 9.9% of your income, you can turn it down and get subsidized health care through the new exchange system. That's not changing.

But Senator Wyden was concerned about the 300,000 people whose premiums were more than 8% of their income (and less than 9.9%). For those folks, he devised a solution that cost the government nothing -- they'd be able to convert their employer's health care contribution into a "free-choice voucher", take that money and spend it to buy another health care plan - presumably a more affordable one - in the health exchanges. (Read more about how it would work in Senator Wyden's post on the Huffington Post.)

In short, Wyden had devised a plan that costs the government nothing, provides health care for 300,000 people that would otherwise not have it, and injects some market competition into the health insurance market.

So, who killed it? Good question.

Writing for the Washington Post, Ezra Klein notes:

This doesn’t serve anyone’s ideological interests, it doesn’t save the country any money and it takes an experiment in cost control off the table.

Senator Wyden told the Oregonian's Charlie Pope that no one is fessing up:

Wyden said Tuesday he was “blindsided” by the decision to include language to the budget bill that neutered his hard-won plan.

Even worse, he has been unable to identify who was behind the effort. ... “When you go and talk to all the parties, they all say ‘somebody else did it.’ And you can’t ever prove it,” he said. ...

“I’m flabbergasted,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my time in public service. That something that is a hard fought battle in public that everybody knows about is killed behind closed doors so quickly after the public fight.”

Unless something changes, Wyden now says that he won't vote for the budget deal:

“I can’t conceive of voting for it in its current form,” Wyden said Tuesday in an interview.

“Without this provision more than 300,000 people would just be in health care no-man’s land. Those are the people who, as a result of the action last week, are just going to be out in the cold,” he said. ...

Wyden would not say whether he would filibuster the bill, which must be approved by Friday to avoid a government shutdown. Nor would he say if he intends to apply some other tactic to express his displeasure. “I’m going to wait and see what the White House has to say; wait and see what the legislative leadership has to say. But I am not going to support this kind of raw special interest power,” Wyden said.

By Kari Chisholm April 13, 2011