House overrides Bush's Medicare veto

By Donna Smith and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what likely is the last big showdown between President George W. Bush and congressional Democrats over the popular Medicare health care program, the House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to override his veto of a bill to keep doctors' payments from being slashed.

By a vote of 383-41, the House voted to overturn Bush's action, just hours after he vetoed the legislation. The Senate was expected to vote on the veto override later on Tuesday.

Supporters of the legislation argued that the scheduled 11 percent pay cut for doctors would discourage many of them from taking on Medicare patients.

The bill would offset the cost to the government of restoring the doctors' pay by cutting payments to big insurers, such as UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Aetna Inc., which have contracts with the Medicare program.

Democrats argued that those contracts with private health care plans, which were encouraged in the 2003 legislation creating a new government drug benefit for the elderly, cost more than providing health coverage under the traditional Medicare program.

They also argued that more generous subsidies to private health plans threaten to undermine the traditional Medicare program.

"Let's send a message to the president his days of doing us harm are very very limited," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat.

Over the years, Democrats and Bush have clashed over his proposed budget cuts for Medicare and the huge new prescription drug benefit he pushed through Congress in 2003.