Weighing action on health bill requires perspective

The Senate health reform bill includes a variety of inducements for those whose votes were required to move the bill forward. Certainly some of this is too bad. But some of the add-ons, such as funding for community health centers and hospitals, make sense.

Does anyone remember when, and how, the Medicare Act of 2003 was negotiated and passed -- by a Republican Congress with a Republican president? I bet Sens. Lindsey O. Graham, Charles Grassley and other Republicans who are crying foul remember.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid's negotiations are child's play compared with the predawn arm-twisting of 2003, when the voting was held open in the House for an unprecedented three hours while a five-vote plurality was mustered.

And what inducements were included in that law? Hundreds of billions of dollars in giveaways to private Medicare insurance plans and, remarkably, a prohibition against Medicare negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry under the new Part D drug program. These huge bonuses to private industry have threatened Medicare's solvency and unnecessarily taken huge sums from taxpayers.

Reporting about the current health reform agreements ought to include some of this recent history, which few know about, acknowledge or care to remember.

Judith Stein, Mansfield, Conn.

The writer is executive director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy Inc.

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Shame on David S. Broder ["Health reform's stench of victory," op-ed, Dec. 24], who has repeatedly attacked Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), for lacking the grace to recognize Mr. Reid's herculean achievement in shepherding the health-care bill to Senate passage.

With a president who delegated so much to Congress and Mr. Reid carrying such an enormous load, passing any bill was an act of legislative achievement that historians of the Senate will long remember.

Brent Budowsky, Washington

The writer was an aide to the late Sen. Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. (D-Tex.) from 1975 to 1980.