Weekend update

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D Nev) announced that the Congressional Budget Office had blessed his Managers' Amendment to HR 3590 (the great compromise) and that Sen. Ben Nelson (D Neb.) has agreed to support the amended bill which would give the Majority Leader the 60 votes that he needs to bring this bill to a final vote on the floor. The next cloture vote is scheduled for 1 am Monday morning which if it receives the necessary 60 vote approval will lead to a final vote on Thursday night, Christmas Eve. The CBO letters are available here and here and its Director's post on the Manager's amendment is here.

I heard Sen. John McCain (R Ariz) say this morning that he thinks that the Senate will pass the bill. At that point, the ball passes back to the House which either could adopt the Senate bill or demand a conference committee. Sen. Kent Conrad (D ND), who chairs the Senate Budget Committee said on the same show that the House will need to stick closely to the Senate version or risk unraveling the deal.

I have written about the great compromise including a parallel FEHB Program for the insured. Having read the relevant provision (Sec. 1334, p. 54), it's not accurate to describe this as a parallel FEHB program. Rather the great compromise rips a page out of the FEHB Program playbook. The OPM Director would contact with at least two health insurance issuers, including at least one not for profit issuers, to offer a multi-state health benefit plan in the state based health insurance exchanges that the Senate bill would create. These multistate plans would be open to individuals and small businesses. The multistate plans would have to satisfy both a combination of health insurace exchange and FEHBA requirements. The manager's amendment specifies that the FEHB Program will be unaffected by these new OPM contracts. It requires OPM to maintain the current level of effort to support the FEHB Program, and it allows OPM to create a new office to handle the multistate contract. I think that this is doable for OPM.

There are many other changes in the 736 page long Managers Amendment. For example, it would postpone the first $6.7 billion annual fee from 2010 to 2011. It will take a while to digest.

In other legislative action, the Senate approved the defense appropriations bill (H.R. 3326). This final Fiscal Year 2010 appropriations bill extends the 65% COBRA / TCC premiums to employees who are involuntarily terminated before March 1 (rather than January 1, 2010) and it extends the subsidy period from nine months to fifteen months retroactively to November 30, 2009, according to Business Insurance. The bill also averts for two months the 21% cut in Medicare Part B reimbursements to doctors according to California Healthline.