Ben Nelson says that the special deal for Nebraska in the Senate health care bill isn’t his fault:
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reached out Thursday evening to South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster, the leader of a group of 13 Republican state attorneys general who are threatening to file suit against the Senate health care bill, and urged him to forgo any legal action, POLITICO has learned. . .
“Senator Nelson insisted that he had not asked for the Cornhusker Kickback to be placed in the U.S. Senate version of the health care bill to secure his vote. Senator Nelson told the attorney general that it was simply a ‘marker’ placed in the U.S. Senate version of the bill and assured the attorney general that it would be ‘fixed,’” [according to a memo sent by McMaster’s chief of staff to other GOP state attorneys general detailing the call.]
The document goes on to say: “Senator Nelson said it would be ‘fixed’ by extending the Cornhusker Kickback (100% federal payment) on Medicaid to every state.”
Senate Democratic leaders have made no reference to a plan to expand the Nebraska deal to the remaining 49 states — a move that would be prohibitively expensive to the federal government and raise serious questions about whether health reform would lower the expected federal deficit, as President Barack Obama claims it would.
Nelson isn’t going to be able to distance himself from this. Whether he “asked” for it or not, he accepted it as his price for his vote. Also, there’s obviously no way that the kickback can be extended to every state, because it would explode the bill’s delicate CBO score.
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