Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday made the move that all have been awaiting, unveiling a Health Care Bill that will be the focus of an intense legislative battle in the Senate. Reid’s bill has received a positive fiscal score from the CBO, which estimates that the fiscal impact will shave about $130 billion from the deficit over the next decade. Reid has included a public option, albeit with an “opt-out option for the States. Reid has also included a tax on so called cadillac health plans, imposing a 40% tax on plans worth $8500 for individuals and $23,000 for families. Additionally he proposes to increase the medicare tax on high earners (200,000 individuals or $250,000 married would go from 1.45% to 1.95%), and in a move sure to send plastic surgeons into a rage proposes a 5% tax on elective “cosmetic surgery. Plenty to digest, and the fighting has already started, with Republican opposition appearing to be unanimous.

But Republicans dismissed it as “another trillion-dollar experiment,” in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.) said the bill “may claim to be deficit-neutral, [but] it uses sleight-of-hand budgetary tricks by assuming unrealistic tax increases and Medicare cuts that members of Congress will not be willing to follow through on.”

Reid got some positive comments from the center of the Democratic Party, with Kent Conrad offering some praise.

Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.), the budget chairman and a leading Democratic fiscal hawk, said after a briefing on the bill, “I was very impressed by what Senator Reid has done.”

Reid will be looking to get all sixty Democratic votes to stop the Republican filibuster, which would reduce his Senate vote requirement to 50 for final passage. A key player now becomes Independent Joe Lieberman, who has threatened to support a Republican filibuster. Reid is not out of the woods, but he is closer than many thought possible. The CBO letter to Reid is attached below, as is the bill itself.

Read the New York Times analysis of key differences between the House and Senate Health Care Bills.

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