WASHINGTON - The fate of a proposal involving federal guarantees for certain hospital bonds remained up in the air yesterday as the House Ways and Means Committee delayed action indefinitely on a health care reform bill.
Rep. Sam Gibbons, the Florida Democrat who is acting chairman of the panel, said he was unable to release the details of his health care reform package and could not allow the committee to vote on it because the Congressional Budget Office had not provided revenue estimates on a number of its provisions.
"We are not able to proceed with any official markup because we do not have the precise and final figures from CBO," Gibbons said.
"It is regrettable we don't have them. We have been waiting on them, demanding them, asking for them." A committee spokesman said later that he had no idea when the figures would be forthcoming from the budget office.
Gibbons made the statement at the start of the first Ways and Means Committee session since he became acting chairman on May 31. On that day, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., was indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges and was forced to relinquish the chairmanship to Gibbons. Rostenkowski would regain the position if he is cleared of the charges.
Rostenkowski attended yesterday's session and sat next to Gibbons, in the seat Gibbons used to occupy as the panel's second highest-ranking Democrat.
A summary of Gibbons' bill released Tuesday shows that its core is a measure passed in March by the Ways and Means subcommittee on health. The subcommittee measure included a provision that would permit federally guaranteed tax-exempt bonds to be issued for health care institutions serving urban and rural areas with inadequate access to medical services.
Gibbons made a number of changes to the subcommittee bill, and it is not clear from the summary whether he retained the provision for federally guaranteed bonds. Thus the fate of the proposal will not be known until the details of Gibbons' bill are released.
The bill does not appear to include a trio of provisions supported by the Public Securities Association and a group of 501(c)(3) issuers that would expand health care advanced refundings and bank deductibility, and remove a cap on the amount of bonds that individuals health care institutions may have outstanding. The provisions were not included in the sub-committee bill.
Also yesterday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Moynihan, D-N.Y., was scheduled to brief his panel in a late-afternoon closed session on the details of his health care reform proposal, a spokesman for the committee said.
Like Gibbons, Moynihan was not planning to release the details of the bill to the public until revenue estimates come in from the CBO.
