Democrats are facing difficult decisions on what to include in the reconciliation infrastructure package, and powerful interests are drawing lines in the sand.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Sen.\u00a0Bernie Sanders<\/a>\u00a0(I-Vt.) said that adding dental, hearing and vision benefits to Medicare in Democrats’ social spending package \u2014 an issue championed by progressives \u2014 is “not negotiable.”<\/p>\n “This to me is not negotiable,” Sanders said on a call with reporters. “This is what the American people want.”<\/p>\n Rep.\u00a0Pramila Jayapal<\/a>\u00a0(D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, added that Sanders’s view is also “the position of the House Progressive Caucus,” adding further heft to the position.<\/p>\n Progressives have long been pushing for expanding the Medicare benefits in\u00a0President Biden<\/a>‘s Build Back Better package, but the new comments illustrate how key the issue is for them.<\/p>\n But life is complicated:\u00a0<\/strong>Democrats are fighting amongst themselves about fitting key priorities into an ever-shrinking spending target, and many other health care priorities have powerful backers.<\/p>\n Speaker\u00a0Nancy Pelosi<\/a>\u00a0(D-Calif.), for example, is a major proponent of extending enhanced financial assistance to help people afford premiums under the Affordable Care Act. And House Majority Whip\u00a0Jim Clyburn<\/a>\u00a0(D-S.C.) is pushing hard for a provision to expand Medicaid in the 12 GOP-led states that have so far rejected the expansion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Democrats are facing difficult decisions on...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41083,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41082\/revisions\/41083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}