This week, the House and Senate approved two versions of the FY2006 budget resolution. A House and Senate conference committee will now meet to work out differences in the two resolutions.
Senate Action
On March 17, the Senate approved, 51-49, the FY2006 budget resolution (S. Con. Res. 18). The Senate Budget Committee approved the resolution on March 10 (see The Source, 3/11/05). As approved by the Budget Committee, the resolution would provide $843.4 billion for discretionary spending in FY2006.
During consideration of the budget resolution, the Senate approved, 52-48, an amendment by Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) that would restore funding for the Medicaid program, and would provide a reserve fund for the establishment of a Bipartisan Medicaid Commission to consider and recommend appropriate reforms for the program. The amendment could lead to a contentious conference with the House. The House resolution would instruct the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, to cut $20 billion over five years.
Amendment cosponsor Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) explained that the budget resolution “provides no spending for the uninsured and a cut in Medicaid of $15 billion over 5 years. This is important because the administration only got a scored savings of $7.6 billion in Medicaid. So, it is $140 billion short of the President’s proposal on the uninsured and the cut for Medicaid is scored at twice the level of the President’s budget according to CBO [the Congressional Budget Office].”
Sen. Smith added, “It has been with some consternation that I have watched, during the recent recession, Medicaid budgets all over this country pushed to extremes, and for that reason, I was one of the Republicans on the Finance Committee last Congress to precondition my vote for tax relief with relief to the States to help try to find a balance so that we do not take the most vulnerable of our citizens, push them out of nursing homes, deny them the basic vaccines of preventive medicine, take the chronically ill and particularly the mentally ill whose lives are often imperiled at their own hands, and put them in a position where their only resource is the emergency rooms of our hospitals, where the care might be well meaning but the outcome is least effective, and the costs incurred then are shifted on to the plans of private employers, further making it difficult to expand health care and provide for the uninsured. So we grow the uninsured population at the expense of the private sector.”
Arguing that the budget resolution would not cut funds for Medicaid, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) stated, “Medicaid spending over the next 5 years will go up 41 percent if left alone. The Budget Committee recommends it go up 39 percent instead of 41 percent. Where I come from, that is no cut; that is a 39 percent increase in the amount of money.” He added, “In order to restrain the growth of Medicaid spending from 41 percent over the next 5 years to 39 percent over the next 5 years, which is $14 billion out of $1.12 trillion, we know exactly what to do to do it and we should move to higher ground and get going with this before we are drowned by this tsunami of mandatory spending [for] Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare that will make it impossible to fund preschool education, to fund kindergarten through 12th grade, to fund our research laboratories, our research and health, and maintain the greatest research universities in the world. That is the choice we will have to make.”
The Senate also approved the following amendments:
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The Senate rejected the following amendments:
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House Action
On March 17, the House approved, 218-214, its version of the FY2006 budget resolution (H. Con. Res. 95). The House resolution would provide $843.4 billion for discretionary spending in FY2006.
During consideration of the budget resolution, the House rejected the following amendments:
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