House Passes Final Health Care And Student Loan Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday put the finishing touches on a sweeping $940 billion health-care overhaul, passing important tax and Medicare changes to a broader measure that became law earlier this week.

By a 220-207, the House passed the supplemental bill, which rewrites several provisions of a wider health-care bill signed into law by President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

The legislation also includes a drastic shake-up of the student loan industry, which bans private lenders from originating student loans. The move had been fiercely opposed by banks and other student lenders.

The bill of fixes was already approved Sunday in the House, but it required another House vote because Senate Republicans successfully argued that two minor student-loan provisions should be struck from the measure.

Senate rules attach special requirements to bills considered under budget reconciliation--a fast-track legislative tactic that was deployed by Democrats to pass the bill.

Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin ruled early Thursday that the two provisions must be stripped from the bill, after Republicans pointed out that they would have minimal revenue effect and were therefore extraneous.

Because the bill was changed in the Senate, it had to bounce back to the House for the second vote. The bill, removed of the two provisions, was passed in the Senate earlier Thursday by a 56-43 vote.

The votes culminate a precarious, but ultimately successful strategy put into motion after Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate with the January election of Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass.).

While the larger health-care bill had already been approved in the Senate before Brown's victory, the second, smaller bill was devised to accommodate changes sought by House Democrats to the original bill.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that, together, the bills will extend insurance coverage to 32 million Americans.

Perhaps most notably, the bill passed Thursday would scale back an excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans and delay its effect until 2018. Another provision would make the legislation's subsidies to purchase private insurance more generous.

With the loss of a Senate seat in the Massachusetts special election, Democrats currently hold a 59-41 majority in the Senate, while 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster. So they hatched a plan to pass the second bill under budget reconciliation, which allowed them to bypass a filibuster and pass the measure by a simple majority of 51 votes.

The reconciliation bill closes a politically unpopular gap in prescription drug coverage under Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors.