Grassley Seeking 'Bipartisan Support' for Reform

By Ed O'Keefe

Let there be no doubt: Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) expects Republican colleagues to join him in supporting health care reform. Just how many remains an open question.

As colleague Shailagh Murray recently reported, “The activist legislator in Grassley would like to affix his name to what he calls ‘the biggest bill of my career,’ and most voters in his increasingly Democratic state would presumably applaud him for it.” He’s seeking a bipartisan compromise on the matter and has emerged as a charter member of the "coalition of the willing," a group of four Republicans and three Democrats seeking common ground in the Senate.

In an effort to find that common ground, the Iowa Republican said today he’s in the process of holding meetings with colleagues not directly involved in health-care reform negotiations. The goal is to explain the process and take the Senate’s political temperature.

“For me, bipartisan support is very important,” Grassley said at the end of an interview.

Asked if he will support the final health care proposals, he said it “depends on how many Republicans I can talk into it being good policy, because bipartisanship isn’t 58 Democrats and three or four Republicans. Bipartisanship is a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats.”

Grassley said that consensus on this issue is key, “because we’re restructuring 17 percent of the economy and no law of Congress in the 225 years has ever done that.”

The Iowa Republican also criticized “the bad public relations” exercised by the Senate’s Health, Education, Pension and Labor (HELP) Committee, and the cost of their proposed health care overhaul. The Congressional Budget Office last week projected it would cost roughly $1 trillion and cover only 16 million people.

“Just divide that out and don’t you get $60,000 a person? I mean, there’s better ways to use the money,” he said.