House Leaders Say Chamber’s Patients’ Rights Bill Will Be More ‘Balanced’ Than Senate Version

"Battle lines" over patients' rights legislation have "hardened" in the House, days after the Senate passed a patients' rights bill (S 283) sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.), CongressDaily reports (Rovner, CongressDaily, 7/2). House Republican leaders predicted that the House version (HR 526) of Kennedy-McCain-Edwards, sponsored by Reps. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Greg Ganske (R-Iowa), would "fail" and promoted a rival bill ( HR 2315) sponsored by Rep. Ernie Fletcher (R-Ky.) (Greenberg, AP/Nando Times, 7/2). The major difference between the Fletcher bill and Norwood-Dingell-Ganske is that under Fletcher, patients could sue health plans in state courts only when the plans refused to abide by decisions made by outside appeals panels while Norwood-Dingell-Ganske would offer a broader right to sue in state and federal courts (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 6/21). House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said that Republicans will not move to block a vote on the Norwood-Dingell-Ganske bill but plan instead to "find enough votes" to pass the Fletcher measure. "We're going to bring up a bill that I think is a better bill. ... And I think we will be able to pass our bill" (CongressDaily, 7/2). He said that President Bush, who has threatened to veto Kennedy-McCain Edwards, would sign the "much more balanced" Fletcher bill (Greenberg, AP/Nando Times, 7/2). Norwood said that Kennedy-McCain-Edwards "is a bill we can sure work off of. ... This is a bill I could vote for now." Norwood, who co-sponsored a similar bill that the House passed in 1999, predicted that he could "hold ... enough of [the 60 House Republicans who voted for his measure two years ago] to prevail comfortably." House GOP leaders "are doing everything in their power to prevent that from happening," CongressDaily reports (CongressDaily, 7/2).

'NewsHour'
PBS' "NewsHour" yesterday featured a panel discussion about whether the Kennedy-McCain-Edwards bill would improve health care in the United States. The panelists were: Dr. Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine; Michael Weinstein, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Sarah Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health; and Robert Moffit, director of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. A transcript, discussion in Real Audio and archive of NewsHour coverage of the patients' rights debate, are available online.

Critical Acclaim?
The New York Times reports that although the health insurance industry has for years "overpowered and outwitted" critics on Capitol Hill -- "deploying a small army" of lobbyists, health policy experts and political strategists to block patients' rights legislation -- industry opponents "now have a well-honed response to every argument" that MCOs use to "fend off" federal regulation. During the Senate patients' rights debate, Democrats "anticipated every argument, and virtually every amendment," offered by Republican opponents of the Kennedy-McCain-Edwards bill. The managed care industry now "faces an uphill struggle to avoid another setback in the House." According to Mary Nell Lehnhard, senior vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, "The Senate debate was depressing. We were dismayed. We didn't do a good enough job explaining some of our concerns." She called the "outlook" in the House "pretty dismal from our perspective" (Pear, New York Times, 7/3).

Poll Numbers
Gallup.com reports that "Americans don't know a lot about the intricacies of the various" patients' rights bills, but they "tend to like the idea of having one." Thirty-six percent of Americans surveyed last weekend said that they have followed the news about the issue "even somewhat closely." Two-thirds of those surveyed said that they "don't know what the differences are" between the Republican and Democratic plans, although about 60% said that they "want Congress to pass such a bill." The American public "is somewhat more likely to put their faith in a Democratic approach to a patient's bill of rights than in a Republican approach," Gallup.com reports (Gallup.com, 7/3).