Nebraska’s Nelson keeps reform bill in state of limbo limbo

Former President Bill Clinton issued an appeal to keep the health-reform measure alive Thursday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A year in the making, sweeping health-care legislation backed by President Barack Obama hung in the balance Thursday as conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson withheld his vote in pursuit of stricter abortion limits and liberals grew restive on the left.

Any lingering hopes the bill’s supporters had of a Republican casting a critical 60th vote vanished when Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said after a meeting with Obama that the Democrats’ timetable for a pre-Christmas vote was “totally unrealistic.”

Nelson, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, was vague throughout the day about his intentions, eventually telling reporters, “I hope we’re getting closer” to agreement.

“Without modifications, the language concerning abortion is not sufficient,” he said earlier in the day in a written statement that summarized the results of days of private negotiations. The second-term Nebraskan opposes the procedure and wants tighter restrictions written into the overhaul.

With Nelson’s support, the White House and Senate Democrats would command 60 votes for the health care measure, enough to overcome a Republican filibuster and pass the bill within a matter of days.

Without it, the prospects are far more uncertain, given unyielding Republican opposition on the conservative right as well as growing expressions of unhappiness on the left that sent the White House scrambling.

“The absolute refusal of Republicans in the Senate to support health care reform and the hijacking of the bill by defenders of the insurance industry have brought us a Senate bill that is inadequate,” Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, said in a statement.

His criticism of GOP lawmakers aside, Trumka’s blast seemed aimed at Nelson, Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and possibly other members of the Senate Democratic caucus who have successfully stripped the legislation of any form of government-run insurance option.

Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, said he, too, was deeply disappointed in the bill.

But like Trumka, he stopped short of urging its defeat. Not so Howard Dean, the former national party chairman, who has said he would oppose the legislation because it does not include a strong enough role for the government in a remade health-care system. Dean unleashed his criticism this week after Lieberman won the deletion of a proposed expansion of Medicare from the bill.

Overall, the legislation is designed to extend coverage to millions who lack it, ban insurance company practices such as denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions and slow the rise in medical spending nationwide.

The bill would require most Americans to purchase insurance, and it includes hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower- and middle-class families afford it.

The White House dispatched strategist David Axelrod to answer liberal critics in television interviews. Former President Bill Clinton, who failed to win a health care overhaul in the 1990s, issued a statement saying, “Allowing this effort to fall short now would be a colossal blunder, both politically for our party and, far more important, for the physical, fiscal, and economic health of our country.”

Liberal supporters of the measure in the Senate renewed their support, as well. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said debates “leading to the passage of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were no less turbulent and partisan.” In the current case, he added, “We have had to make painful compromises,” but he predicted what will be remembered is that “President Obama achieved his No. 1 domestic priority and that Congress passed a big, historic bill.”

supporter of the legislation, said she was involved in talks to cushion the impact on nonprofit insurance companies from the effects of a new industrywide tax. She also