Senate effort to grease the skids for health IT bill fails
- By Nancy zz_Ferris
- Aug 01, 2008
The Senate failed to pass the Wired for Health Care Quality Act by unanimous consent yesterday, although leaders of both parties pushed hard for passage.
Two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, blocked the leadership move, sources said. Neither senator’s office returned calls seeking to learn their reasoning.
The failure after weeks of negotiations and tinkering with the bill’s language discouraged supporters. It means the bill likely will not pass without lengthy deliberations by the full Senate, at a time when the body is having difficulty getting its work done because of partisan splits.
The Senate is expected to leave Washington today for its August recess and return after Labor Day. Then the impending national elections will make any action even more of a challenge.
“There has been an incredible amount of staff work and negotiation,” said Craig Orfield, a spokesman for Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The HELP Committee approved the bill in June 2007.
Orfield and others said they doubted the bill could be modified further to satisfy the two holdouts. The draft was changing as late as July 30 in response to concerns from the Bush administration and others.
Among other changes, the bill now would close a loophole in the rules that implement the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 with respect to marketing health goods and services. Health care providers no longer would be allowed to provide information about patients and their ailments to vendors without the patient’s consent.
In addition, the Health IT Standards Entity created by the bill would be a public-private partnership like the emerging successor to the American Health Information Community, rather than a federal advisory committee.
The bill’s “passage would have increased the likelihood that we take meaningful steps this year to accelerate the responsible, effective use of health IT," said Christine
Bechtel, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, which leads a group of consumer organizations backing the bill.
But Bechtel and other health IT advocates said they were not giving up. Yesterday’s failure to act “doesn’t mean by any stretch that it’s over,” said Joel White, executive director of a coalition called Health IT Now!
Observers said that House passage of a health IT bill might encourage the Senate leaders to schedule floor action on their bill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill with bipartisan backing last month, but then the chairman of the Ways and Means health subcommittee, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) announced he would introduce a competing bill. Both committees have jurisdiction over health matters.
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