Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus , working with the Congressional Budget Office, has come up with a way to write a health care overhaul bill costing less than $1 trillion that would not increase the federal budget deficit.
“We have ways, according to CBO today, to fully pay for this bill,” Baucus said Thursday after a closed-door session with all Finance Committee members.
Reaching the $1 trillion goal line is a major step for the Finance Committee, which has been seen as the main arena for those hoping to get a bipartisan health care bill. The original estimated cost of the bill was $1.6 trillion over 10 years.
Baucus, D-Mont., and the other panel members are expected to release a detailed package and perhaps bill language soon, although Baucus was coy about when he and ranking GOP member Charles E. Grassley of Iowa would be ready for a markup.
The next step will be taking the set of proposals from CBO and melding them into bill language.
“At least there are options that are available to us now to get us to where we need to be,” said Kent Conrad , D-N.D., the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and a key Baucus lieutenant on the health care bill. “And now the question is which of those options do you adopt to do that? And that’s the process we’re going through now.”
Although Baucus declined to discuss the full contents of the package, he said it will contain language to cap the currently unlimited tax exclusion for employer-provided health benefits, a subsidy worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
“A version is in,” Baucus said.
Baucus had proposed capping the tax exclusion for health benefits at $17,240 for a family of four and $6,800 for individuals — essentially the value of the standard insurance plan in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, plus 10 percent. Baucus asked Ron Wyden , D-Ore., to work with the Joint Committee on Taxation to study that idea.