Fear that the Medicare bill will not be passed this year increases

by Christine Moyer

WASHINGTON - The Oct. 17 target date set by congressional leaders to present President Bush with a Medicare prescription drug bill has passed and so, many fear, will the chance to reform the massive health-care system before lawmakers go home for the year in November.

"Some modest progress is being made but there is no broad agreement," said Dan Mendelson, president of the Health Strategies Consultancy. "They want people to think that they're making progress because there is very little time left."

The House and Senate have passed separate plans to overhaul Medicare and provide a prescription drug benefit to senior citizens, but negotiators have been struggling to iron out the differences in the two bills.

Supporters of prescription drug benefits consider it critical for Congress to reach a compromise this year to avoid dragging the issue into an election year, when controversial bills often die.

U.S. Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-5) is one of a handful of Congress members on the conference committee that is negotiating the legislation. In an interview Wednesday, she discounted speculation that the issue would extend into next year.

"The bill will pass this year," Johnson said. "If it goes into next year, it may not make it, and it would be very serious if the bill didn't pass."

Johnson said House and Senate negotiators met Wednesday afternoon and had meetings scheduled for the rest of the week to discuss such major issues as what kind of drug benefit to provide and how it would be delivered.

Johnson insisted that the conference committee has been making progress. But Mendelson said the conferees are "still at the drawing board." He said that while House and Senate negotiators have reached agreement on many small issues, they have not settled on a number of overarching issues, including details of the prescription drug benefit and rules for the importation of drugs.

"They don't have anything yet," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. He said that the conferees have done little to resolve the stark differences between the House and Senate bills.

Ornstein added that dragging the issue into next year would hurt Congress members as they seek re-election. "This will cause many more problems for Republicans than Democrats because they're in charge," he said. Senior citizens are particularly frustrated that the final bill hasn't passed, said Arnold Schwartz, a member of AARP's state leadership council.

"They have the feeling that nothing's going to happen this year," he said. "And the feeling is getting to be that nothing is ever going to happen."

Brenda Kelley, the state director of AARP Connecticut, said the senior citizens' lobby is focused on getting a bill out of the conference committee that it can support. "The bill will remain a top priority whether they pass it or not" this year, Kelley said.

Schwartz said the battle has turned into a "partisan fight."

The Senate bill received bipartisan support, while the Republican-crafted House bill passed by a single vote.