The perceived wariness of a few U.S. Senate moderate Democrats on moving forward the health reform bill cobbled together by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dissipated yesterday. All 58 Democrats and the two independents who typically vote with the majority party Dems held together and passed the bill (with an $858 billion pricetag) along to Senate floor debate on 60-39 vote. The vote from tri-state senators saw, of course, the three Democrats (Tom Harkin, Tim Johnson and Ben Nelson) voting affirmatively, while Republicans Mike Johanns, Charles Grassley and John Thune voted nay.

“This is a momentous, pivotal vote,” Harkin said.

Harkin — who could not appear in person when 1,500 Iowa Democrats attended the Jefferson-Jackson event last night, but gave a message via video — said now is the time for the bill particulars to be chewed over. One timeline  heard today is the Senate could work up to Dec. 23 to try to finalize health care reform, but a vote may not happen until mid-January. The House has passed a bill, while the Senate is still not there. If the Senate does, the process would involve a reconciliation between the House and Senate versions.

“We can see the finish line now, but we are not there,” said  Reid.

Check out the You Tube video below to see the roll call vote.

Or for a wry look at the 2,000-plus page Senate health care bill, view the video below.

An important vote on health care reform comes off tomorrow, when the U.S. Senate will undertake a procedural vote on the recently introduced Patient Protection and Affordability Act. It is not a vote to pass the bill out of the Senate, but to move full consideration of the bill in the chamber. There are 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans and two independents who typically vote with the Dems, but perception is that a few Democrats could balk and aid plans by the GOP senators to filibuster the bill if 60 votes aren’t garnered.

That would be too bad, says U.S. Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat who hails from nearby Vermillion, S.D. Johnson today is saying the bill deserves the opportunity to be considered on the Senate floor, and so thinks the measure should be passed along tomorrow without all the hue-and-cry. He likes that the bill is estimated to give health care coverage to 94 percent of Americans as part of the effort to stand “up to the big insurance companies on behalf of the American people.”

You can count on Republicans John Thune of South Dakota, Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Johanns to vote nay tomorrow, while Johnson and Tom Harkin of Iowa will vote affirmatively. That leaves Ben Nelson (above), a Nebraska Democrat as a wild card, and the National Republican Committee is pressuring Nelson to vote ‘no.’ Additionally, Nelson will come to his voting presumbly having digested the editorial by the Omaha World-Herald to scuttle the Patient Protection and Affordability Act now.

In a release two days ago,  Nelson doesn’t say how he’ll vote, but I’ll read that he’ll be a ‘yes.’ You decide what this means:

“Some who define it as a vote in front of the (Harry) Reid bill are misinformed, or are intentionally trying to mislead people. I remember that some in my party said the same thing — equating this procedural vote with a vote for a bill — when the Republicans were in charge. If your goal is to obstruct, that’s a convenient argument.

“… In reality, the meaning of the motion to proceed is very simple: It’s a motion to commence debate and an opportunity to make changes. Let me say it again: it is a motion to start debate on a bill and to try to improve it. If you don’t like the bill, then why would you block your own opportunity to amend it? Why would you stop senators from doing the job they’re elected to do — debate, consider amendments and take action on an issue affecting every American?”

It’s worth noting the Senate PPAA bill is not the same as what passed out of the House two Saturdays ago. Apparently the important 2009 federal health care reform bill votes must occur on Saturdays.

A report Tuesday showed the obesity rate for Americans hanging (like a gut) again in the low-30s percent, while pointing to the rate climbing to 43 percent by 2018. Obesity is measured at 30 pounds above a healthy weight, and if it rises to the 2018 projection, one-fifth of all health care costs will be related to medical conditions arising from being considerably overweight.

I asked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, what federal officials can do to reduce obesity at a time when  health care reform is being debated in Congress. He said the federal government can push a few things, but said Americans need to take control of their own health.

Said Grassley, a three-mile-per-day jogger: “The answer is yes (for federal action), but not very directly, because you aren’t going to control what people can put into their mouth and whether or not they walk enough and exercise enough or what they eat that is unhealthy.”

Grassley laid out four areas for action: (1) more education to aid healthy living decisionmaking (he cited education being instrumental in reducing smoking rates), (2) having more doctors encouraging preventive medicine when speaking with patients and (3) creating healthier school meals, which is something Iowa’s other senator, Tom Harkin, frequently has worked towards. The fourth Grassley suggestion is Congress creating an opening for health insurance companies to have differing insurance premium costs depending on whether a person is obese.

“I would propose that we have different premium levels for people that don’t have a healthy lifestyle,” Grassley said. “By the way, a Safeway executive has made several appearances on Capitol Hill talking about how his company does that through their health insurance program, where they give people money for first-dollar costs of health care, and they get more money if they have a healthy lifestyle.”

Grassley again relayed his continuing opposition to a soda pop tax, which had at one point this summer been pitched as a means to pay for health reform.

“I’m not convinced that would work, and I am very convinced it is a nuisance tax,” he said.

Word that the federal government may buy the empty Thomson Correctional Center in western Illinois to house suspected terrorists now housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has stirred concern among Americans. Some are also chapped at the fact that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also plans civilian court trials for the Guantanamo detainees instead of military tribunals.

This morning, U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said he opposes bringing the suspected terrorists to America, whether they’re in western Illinois near Iowa or anywhere else. He said he hadn’t heard concern about that through yesterday, then mid-call related staffers told him 10 calls from concerned Iowans had been received this morning.

“They are still enemy combatants, anyway you look like. I think that it brings legitimacy to terrorism, that they have the constitutional rights of every other criminal in America. They have more constitutional rights … than our own soldiers, putting their life on the line in the battlefield, have if they were court-martialed,” Grassley said, his voice rising.

To join a Journal Speakout discussion on whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects should be tried in criminal court or a military tribunal, click here. And I’ll have a more extensive piece on the Grassley call shortly.

Steve King looks at the health-care proposal.

You may have seen the big feature in The Journal today concerning health care reform and Steve King. It was something of a shocker that has people talking — Republican King is so opposed to health reform pushed by Democrats that he chose to stay in D.C. Saturday to cast a ‘nay’ vote instead of coming back home to see a son get married.

King also on Saturday had a second big public event in three days to air his concerns with the bill. In an interview with me yesterday, King said the genesis of the public rally idea came from Sioux City native Col. Bud Day, a big buddy of 2008 presidential candidate John McCain after the two were prisoners of war in the Vietnam War.

King said he’d been hunting with Day in Northwest Iowa when the most decorated American veteran came up with the rally idea. Separate from that, in an interview with fellow Journal reporter Michele Linck, Day on Friday praised King for his leadership in setting up the rallies. Day will be in a Journal feature this week after being included in a new Topps cards (you know, the company that makes baseball cards) series entitled American Heritage Heroes. He is one of the 10 military heroes, while there are 10 political heroes (including Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama), 10 civil rights heroes, and so on.

Talking with Michele, I connected the dots on the mutual admiration the two men have for each other. Day told Linck about hunting in the Loess Hills, when he suggested less talk and more action in a demonstrative way, including perhaps surrounding the White House. King then worked with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., on the plans. One image from the Thursday rally showed King (left) holding the 1,990 pages of the health reform bill (that ultimately passed on 220-215 count). You can see more images from Saturday’s event here.

“I got this real excited call from Steve. ‘I took your advice, we charged The Hill, surrounded Congress,’ ” Day related.

The three-day gap in posts here is due to a long weekend in Cedar Falls. Had a good time — and had a political connection when watching University of Northern Iowa Panther volleyball. In walked U. S. Sen. Charles Grassley, who goes to a lot of volleyball, in part to hear his son Jay handle the announcing. We had a brief chat, then others in the crowd hit him up as well, so I suppose Grassley didn’t get to see too much of the Panther plays.

Anyway, being away from computer and television for the weekend, my news dosage was simply reading the Sunday newspaper. Settling back into town here I see the U.S. House passage of federal health care reform ran on P5 of the Journal, while in the Waterloo Courier it warranted P1. The Courier also devoted much of the jump page to a comprehensive breakdown of what was in the reform bill,  as well as what was in the competing Republican reform bill that wasn’t enacted. I knew from reading the piece that only one Republican voted for the bill, so was certain that tri-state Republicans Steve King of Iowa and Jeff Fortenberry of Fortenberry did not vote for it.

However, several Democrats voted against the measure, but there was no breakdown of names in the article. So the nagging thought the rest of the weekend was whether South Dakota Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat who lines up with the fiscal moderate Blue Dogs, had bucked the party line and voted against the bill. She’d expressed concern over health reform in a conference call just over a week ago, and I had an inkling she might not vote for reform in a state where Republicans dominate politically.

Sure enough, Herseth Sandlin voted ‘nay.’ As this Mount Blogmore post relates, that riled some South Dakota Democrats who saw merits in comprehensive reform. In a statement, Herseth Sandlin bemoaned the potential impact on Medicaid provisions on S.D.’s state budget and reductions in payments for long-term care under Medicare. She also pointed to insufficient cost containment and deficit reduction provisions. Herseth Sandlin said South Dakota families just didn’t support that particular reform package, as much as she still thinks reform is necessary.

So all three Siouxland members of Congress voted no on HR 3962. Now the gaze turns to the Senate, where this piece relates how that bill is unacceptable to some senators.

Posted on Twitpic by Somethingfishie

Federal health care reform talks have achieved critical mass, as the end of this week will be a key time to see whether reform moves forward. The U.S. House could vote on a measure Saturday, and today some local chapters of the American Association of Retired People are holding press conferences to talk about support for the House bill. That will happen in a few minutes in Des Moines with Iowa AARP talking about advocacy efforts.

On the flip side, at noon Republicans like Iowa 5th District Congressman Steve King and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann will follow through with a press event called a “house call” on the east steps of the Capitol in Washington to beat back reform. Two days ago King and other reform critics called on Americans to “fill the streets of Washington and opposed the (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi health care bill. ”

“For liberals, this legislation is the crown jewel of their socialist agenda,” King said, since it “will place bureaucrats between patients and doctors,” and raise taxes on small businesses. Bachmann pitched the “house call” with, “Nothing scares members of Congress like freedom-loving Americans.”

With equal conviction he’s right on the issue, on Tuesday a Storm Lake newspaperman gave testimony to the Senate Health, Education, Health and Pensions Committee hearing on health insurance, as invited by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times spoke about how the newspaper has struggled to continue to provide health insurance to 12 employees as costs rise. He cited rates doubling (and then annually increasing by double digits) after an employee had a kidney transplant in 2005, and bemoaned an inability to change insurers because of employees with pre-existing conditions.

“The Storm Lake Times now pays nearly $50,000 per year for health insurance coverage. That’s almost as much as we pay for newsprint. Were it not for such high insurance costs we could add more employees and help to grow our local economy,” Cullen testified.

Cullen noted Buena Vista County families have an average household income of $36,000 and it costs about one-third of that amount to buy an annual private health care plan. Click here to see the 176-minute hearing, including the very last minute in which an incensed, arms-waving Cullen goes off prepared testimony to vent about  insurance companies “screwing” Americans.

Two days, two U.S. Senators from Iowa, two different outlooks on the value of including a public option to access the federal employees health plan. Yesterday U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said a public option isn’t defensible as part of federal health care reform since it will knock private health insurance companies out of the business. This morning, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat, said a public option will ensure competition and make companies offer more pleasing packages.

Harkin is glad the bill being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid includes a public option with an opt-out option individual states can have.  He said he’s not overly pleased with the opt-out option, but said that’s part of lawmaking — senators frequently vote for imperfect legislation that on balance is better than not acting. With the current health reform package, Harkin said, “There is too much other good stuff in the bill to sink it.”

Questioned, Harkin said he couldn’t think of a state that actually would opt-out. Additionally, he said Democrats will line up 60 votes to pass reform. That includes former Democrat, now Independent Joe Liebermann, who said Tuesday he’d try to sink the bill. For one thing, Lieberman still caucuses with Dems, Harkin noted, and “I don’t believe he wants to go down in history like that (opposing reform).”

He said there is a lot of jockeying going on for  concessions on this  bill (and perhaps other bills) by the few Democratic senators who are publicly balking, including U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. Harkin said it’s a case of senators looking for “leverage, leverage, leverage.”

Again, Harkin greatly differs from Grassley on a public option. “There is strong support for a public option in poll after poll,” he said, then added, “Iowans I talk to see this as plain common sense.”

On another high-profile issue, Harkin said it is time for the U.S. to move forward to stem global warming via the Boxer-Kerry climate change bill that some see having dim odds of passage in 2009. Harkin says he supports the bill and “hopes” it advances, since the U.S. uses the most energy and is the globe’s biggest polluter.

“We have to take the lead in the world,” and “show the rest of the world we mean business” to reduce carbon emissions, Harkin said.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa,  isn’t looking with humor at the back-and-forth on whether Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has lined up 60 votes for a public option in federal health care reform. Reid announced two days ago that his counting showed 60 votes for the public option, but reports since indicate that might not be solidly so. In a conference call with reporters this morning, Grassley said passing valid health care reform is important business, so he’s not chuckling over Reid’s beancounting.

Grassley said Iowans want elements of reform like portability of insurance coverage over state lines and with setting medical malpractice award maximums. “There is no Republican satisfied with the status quo on health care,” he said.

Some contend minority party Republicans marginalized themselves by standing up against reform measures that Democrats wanted and with talk of “death panels,” and so effectively  shut themselves out of negotiating health reform details. Grassley, who opposes a public option to access the federal employees health care system because it would undermine private plans, said the GOP negotiated in good faith and offered amendments in committees, which were voted down on party lines.

“This is true — opt-in, opt-out, trigger  or just pure (public) option — you get the government as a competitor… it is going to ultimately force private insurers out of business,” he said.

Asked if he foresees Democrats being subjected to major crunch time arm-twisting to vote for reform, Grassley said there “is tremendous pressure” to deliver a political victory for President Barack Obama, who was elected by a large margin in the Electoral College.

“This is his Number One goal,” Grassley said. “Now, the further you get away from that (2008) election and that mandate, then there can still be the same amount of pressure and arm-twisting — and I’m using your words, not mine — (but) less effective than it is right here  in the first year. That’s my experience, probably with more than one president.”

Grassley said Republicans are fighting an uphill battle against Democrats. “There are 60 of them. And if they 60 stick together, they’re going to get it done. Now, are they going to stick together?” he said.

Jason (left) and Chuck Swaggerty-Morgan with their children.

The Journal this morning took an expansive look at same-sex marriage at the six-month mark of existence, following an April Iowa Supreme Court ruling. We looked at marriage licenses in 14 Northwest Iowa counties as a means to help readers decide if the state had become the gay marriage “mecca” some had feared.

I personally wrote two features on two same-sex married couples and a story on the politics of  same-sex marriage opponents seeking to use a state constitutional amendment to overturn the new reality. Same-sex marriage may not be the new normal, but it is “Their New Normal” for about 800 recently married Iowans, the Journal headline reads.

Jason Swaggerty-Morgan and Chuck Swaggerty-Morgan of Sioux City were among the six couples who were party to the 2005 lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ruling. Jason Swaggerty-Morgan said he expects a statewide referendum would support same-sex marriage.

“We both think that the majority of Iowans would vote for equality,” Jason Swaggerty-Morgan said.

He said there is more acceptance of gay marriage with each passing year. Swaggerty-Morgan said there are exceptions, but older people typically “have a problem with diversity.” Since being married on April 27, Jason Swaggerty-Morgan said he’s received lots of kudos from neighbors, regardless of political and religious affiliation, including Republicans, conservatives and Catholics.

“Is there ever going to be a utopia world where everybody just loves gay marriage? No. There’s no uptopia world where everyone loves interracial marriage. There will always be people who don’t believe in equality, there will always be bigots,” Swaggerty-Morgan said. “But I believe Iowa is full of fair-minded people. I think we’ve been on the cutting edge of equality and fairness — as far as interracial relationships, segregation, we’ve been ahead of the federal government, we’ve been ahead of other states. It shouldn’t be any surprise that we’re ahead when it comes to civil rights for gay people. I’m really proud of Iowa about that.”

Swaggerty-Morgan said some same-sex couples won’t get married, because they see no need for it, much like heterosexual couples elect to live together without being married. Additionally, Swaggerty-Morgan said he knows some same-sex couples who won’t get married until gay marriage is federally recognized.

Justin Uebelhor, spokesman for One Iowa, said some same-sex couples have come to the state’s largest gay and lesbian advocacy group “dismayed” that their Iowa marriage licenses were not being recognized by the federal government due to the Defense of Marriage Act.

“Some companies have used that as an excuse to deny benefits from these same-sex couples even though they have that marriage license here in Iowa,” he said.