Nebraska Pulse Political Blog

The way U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson sees it, something had to be done.

Health care insurance premiums, which had been rising quickly, “will double in seven or eight years” if nothing is done, he told Norfolk business leaders on Thursday.

Nelson explained why he voted for the Senate’s version of health care reform — and discussed other issues — as he spoke via cell phone Thursday just outside the U.S. Senate floor to the Norfolk Area Chamber of Commerce’s legislative council.

Nelson, who was called to the floor to cast two votes during about a 25-minute conversation, said there are an estimated 30 million people who don’t have health insurance and show up at emergency rooms nationwide when they become ill.

“They get health care,” Nelson said. “They just don’t have insurance.”

That unpaid care gets passed on to everyone who has health insurance. So getting more people to have insurance will result in savings for those already covered, Nelson said.

Nelson said he voted in favor of about three-fourths of the amendments being offered Thursday on the reconciliation reform bill because “they are improvements to the overall bill.”

“If I would have had the opportunity to write this bill, it would have been a different bill,” Nelson said, “but I didn’t.”

More than a few Nebraskans have been critical of Nelson since he cast the 60th and decisive vote for the Senate health care bill late last year. Nelson said if he had not voted for the bill, a worse version of it would ultimately have passed.

That’s because any time there was not a 60th vote, the leadership majority in the Senate would have gone to reconciliation and got an “up or down vote” on the basis of the bill at that time, Nelson said.

“It would have been most likely the House version,” Nelson said. “It had the government-run operation and a whole host of other things that were objectionable. That’s why I voted to keep it in play so that we could scrub it clean and I could get the government-run public option provision out and suitable language in to make sure that abortions were not paid for by federal dollars.”

Former state Sen. Doug Cunningham of Norfolk asked Nelson if what’s being called the “Cornhusker Kickback” was an unfunded mandate or if it would be provided to other states.

Nelson said he never asked for the $100 million to cover the state’s new Medicaid costs.

Instead, Nelson said, he sought an option to allow states to “opt out” or have the federal government provide the money instead of making the states provide new Medicaid costs.

The new bill will treat all the states the same, Nelson said. It will be a “fully under-funded” federal mandate for “two or three years” and “then will have to be dealt with later.”

The mandate to extend Medicaid is going to cost $35 billion for the states or the federal government. But that problem was going to be there regardless, Nelson said.

“Until I blew the whistle on it, all $35 billion was going to be passed on to the states as an unfunded federal mandate,” he said.

Nelson said he knows the legislation won’t solve all the nation’s health care problems.

“It is what it is, and it’s better than what it was,” he said.

After the senator got off the phone to return to the Senate floor, the questions from the legislative council got more pointed for Zachary Nelson, the senator’s field representative for Northeast Nebraska.

Questions included how the government would be able to force people to buy health insurance and if illegal immigrants are covered. Several people expressed opinions that the legislation would eliminate private insurance and grow into a big government expenditure that would grow out of control.

Zachary Nelson said he disagreed with some of the comments, but he didn’t have answers for all of the questions.

Tom Schommer, a Norfolk businessman, said the new health care bill would cost small businesses so much that many small businesses would have to identify one or two employees to get rid of to pay for additional health insurance costs.

“Instead of job creation, it’s job elimination,” Schommer said.

But Zachary Nelson reiterated what the senator said earlier — that since 2001, wages have increased an average of 19 percent while health care insurance premiums have risen 78 percent.

“That is unsustainable,” he said.