Montana Moderates Revive Medicaid Expansion

'Montana Moderates Revive Medicaid Expansion'

continued…

"The reality is that 85 percent of the Republican caucus does not support [Buttrey's bill]," Wittich said. "They were never consulted. They were never negotiated with."

The committee's Republican majority then voted to give the bill a "do not pass" recommendation on Tuesday. That meant it would need a supermajority of 60 House members to vote to keep the bill alive, an insurmountable hurdle.

That's when Democrats fired a "silver bullet," and hours of legislative gymnastics around arcane procedural rules over two days began.

In the early days of the legislative session in January, leaders from both parties agreed to give each other six "silver bullets" to "blast" pet bills out of unfavorable committees and onto the House or Senate floor for broader debates and votes.

House Republican leadership argued the Democrats couldn't do that with the Medicaid bill, but eventually 11 members of their party split and sided with Democrats, bringing the Medicaid expansion bill to the full House, which will debate it and vote on it Thursday night.

Republican representatives are sure to face strong pressure to vote against the bill. Critics deride it as implementation of the loathed Obamacare. On the other hand, lawmakers have heard testimony from people like 54-year-old pizza delivery driver Max Naethe of Kalispell, Mont., who has diabetes and heart problems. He makes too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to get an Affordable Care Act subsidy for private insurance premiums.

"I don't think anything Obama is a good idea," Naethe says, but, "there are people out here whose lives literally hinge on this bill. It's crucial that this be pushed through."

Nor are all Montana Democrats entirely comfortable with the only Medicaid expansion bill left before them, written as it is by a Republican.

"There are lots of things in the bill that, quite frankly, I struggled to accept," said House Minority Leader Chuck Hunter. "But I think [it's] in the spirit of having something that works for both sides of the aisle to accept."

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.