Oklahoma's Two U.S. Senators Ready To Debate Health Care Bill

By Tara Vreeland, The News On 6

UNDATED -- U.S. Senate Democrats are preparing for a battle to get their health care bill passed. That debate will begin after the Thanksgiving holiday and Oklahoma's two U.S. senators say they are ready for the fight.

Reckless, irresponsible, and dishonest -- strong words coming from Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn about the Democratic health care bill.

Appearing on national TV Sunday morning, Dr. Tom Coburn says this bill does not reform health care, but grows government.

"This bill creates 70 new government agencies with thousands of new bureaucrats. I'm talking about the Senate bill with 1,597 different instances where the secretary is mandated to write rules and regulations. If you think that isn't going to get between patients and doctors, I have a whole lot of swamp land in Oklahoma I'd like to sell you," said Senator Tom Coburn.

"This bill doesn't fix what's wrong with health care. We're treating the symptoms, not the disease. And, it's really malpractice what we're doing," Senator Tom Coburn said.

U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe echoed Coburn with attacks to the bill.

"This is strictly putting it in the lands of government. If you really want more government involved in your health care, if you really want to lose the choices you have today, then we now have an underlying bill that will be very difficult to change as I said, any change we want to make to it from the Republican side will take 60 votes and we only have 40 Republicans," said Senator Jim Inhofe.

The senate Democrats barely won the vote on Saturday night, but got the 60 votes needed to start the debate, which is expected to last several weeks.

Democratic leaders say they are open to making changes in order to get the legislation passed.

"Any one Democrat who wants to change the underlying bill, this is his chance to do it and they didn't do it," said Senator Jim Inhofe.

However, Republicans are hoping to derail the measure in its current form.

"We can fix all these problems, but we have a government-centered approach that is already failing, instead of a patient-centered approach and we ought to be concerned about patients. Not the government," said Senator Tom Coburn.

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