After the House of Representatives did the unthinkable Thursday—
passed substantive legislation with a resounding bipartisan vote, Mitch McConnell
opted to leave town without acting on it.
"I want to reassure everyone ... we'll move to it very quickly when we get back," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, adding he expects it will pass the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was "disappointed" the Senate wouldn't take up the legislation Friday morning after voting on the budget.
"I understand it's late, whatever day it is," Reid said. "We're willing to move forward, I'm disappointed that we may not able able to get it done tonight."
The bill is the permanent repeal of the Medicare "doc fix," a flawed formula for calculating reimbursements to physicians for treating Medicare payments. The bill passed by the House also includes two years of funding for the Children's Health Insurance program and funding for community health centers. Both of these provisions in the House bill have some problems for Senate Democrats, who have been pushing hard for a four-year extension of CHIP funding, and because there's gratuitous anti-abortion language inserted into the health center funding.
The current patch for the "doc fix" expires on March 31, but McConnell says that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told him they can "handle" a two-week gap and prevent pay cuts to doctors from taking place.
This gives Senate Democrats a bit of an edge to go for that four years of funding for CHIP. Given the huge vote in the House and the popularity of CHIP, the historic nature of the vote, this is very likely something that Senate Democrats could indeed accomplish and get the House to agree to, and is something they should continue to push for. Getting the anti-abortion language out of it would probably be harder, so at the least they should fight for CHIP now that they've been given time to do it.