Domenici Medicare vote doesn't help his party

| The New Mexican

7/17/2008 - 7/18/08

Pete Domenici is helping build a case for Tom Udall, not Steve Pearce, replacing him in the U.S. Senate.

Not that Democrat Udall, who for now leads in public-opinion polls and campaign fundraising, appears to need the help of the legendary Republican — but Domenici's vote last week to uphold President Bush's veto of a Medicare-reform bill sent this message to New Mexico voters: If you've got an ounce of humanitarian blood, don't send anyone vaguely resembling Domenici to the national capitol's north side.

Give Pete points for courage — or for symbolic, if futile, support of the besieged Bush from a fellow lame duck: Domenici was one of few senators opposing the measure and favoring the veto. Fellow New Mexican Jeff Bingaman, predictably, went for the override.

Twenty-one Republicans realized, as Bingaman did, that the bill Congress had passed could make the difference in huge numbers of senior citizens having a doctor and not having one:

Physicians nationwide were facing a 10-percent cut in payments from Medicare. How many of them would have gone on taking senior-citizen patients, and how many of them would have said "sorry, we're out of the Medicare business"?

Congressional Democrats didn't want to find out. And when their aging and cancer-stricken icon, Ted Kennedy, made his Hollywood return to the Senate floor to cast his vote in favor of a bill taking a whack out of insurance-company subsidies instead of physicians' fees, the rout was on: 70-26 in the Senate, 383-41 in the House of Representatives, to override the president. Udall, of course, was with the vast majority. And Southern New Mexico's Rep. Pearce? He missed the vote; busy campaigning with John McCain, y'know ...

It's too early to tell whether, or by how much, the Democratic majority will grow after the November election — but between Dems and I've-seen-the-light Republicans, might that Medicare vote in this Congress offer hope for sweeping health care reform in the next?

And will the American Medical Association, which wielded its lobbying strength to rescue an ox about to be gored, support reform that might ask its members, as well as insurance and other industries, to sacrifice for the nation's good? The association didn't cover itself in glory with the veiled threat that patients might be forsaken, whether or not any of its members might have even considered doing so much as turning away new patients whose insurance includes Medicare.

The federal system's physician-reimbursement formula pretty clearly needs work, so count on the AMA to campaign on that front. But just as New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson is rallying support for some kind of universal care in this impoverished state, the whole nation's health-care establishment must give up its blind resistance to widespread coverage.

Udall for Domenici would be an encouraging trade with that direction in mind — and nobody's made that clearer than the senator himself.