Patients' Rights Bill DOA
Talks between the White House and Senate Democrats over patients' rights legislation have broken down completely, leaving the issue as a likely point of debate for the fall campaigns.
A group of senators led by Ted Kennedy had hoped direct talks with the White House could lead to a breakthrough on the stalled bill, but they say those talks have now broken off, reports CBS News Correspondent Bob Fuss.
"They, in effect, said they didn't feel it was worthwhile for any of these negotiations to continue," Kennedy, D-Mass., told reporters. He said negotiators from the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-led Senate would try to hammer out a compromise when they return from the month-long August recess, but prospects for a breakthrough appeared slim in the run-up to the November congressional elections.
The patients' rights bill is a hot-button election issue, particularly for Democrats, who made clear they would try to use the collapse of negotiations to their political advantage by casting President Bush as an ally of the powerful HMOs lobby.
"The stumbling issue was corporate accountability, the unwillingness of the administration to move away from its position that HMOs and insurance companies should be judged differently than any other industry," Kennedy said.
Kennedy represented Senate Democrats in secret negotiations that started earlier this year with Josh Bolton, Bush's deputy chief of staff, and Nicholas Calio, assistant to the president for legislative affairs.
Kennedy said he notified Calio earlier Thursday that negotiations were off. "He basically indicated that the White House felt they went as far as they could," Kennedy said.
For months, both sides had held out hope of reaching a compromise on patients' rights.
In a sign of progress, Kennedy and other Democrats had tentatively agreed to accept a White House-backed plan to let patients sue their HMOs and insurers in state court using uniform federal standards which have yet to be written.
The House-backed patients' bill of rights included similar language calling for the use of a so-called federal cause of action in state court. At that time, Democrats objected, warning the administration would undercut laws in states such as Texas and Michigan which have their own bill of patients' rights.
To address Democratic concerns, congressional sources said the White House had tentatively agreed to include provisions that would protect state laws.
But negotiations stalled over other key issues, chief among them caps on damage awards.
Democratic negotiators Kennedy and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina support the Senate-passed bill, which sets no arbitrary limits on awards for punitive damages or compensatory damages, except as provided under state law.
By contrast, the House-passed bill backed by the White House established a cap of $1.5 million on punitive and noneconomic compensatory damages.
Democrats also balked at administration proposals that could limit a patients' right to go to an outside arbitrator to settle medical disputes with HMOs.