The two sources for this story are The Hill (an article posted last night) and Thomas.gov (the Congressional website that gives information on votes and activities in Congress on a daily basis).

Yesterday in the Senate twelve Democrats and one Independent joined all Republicans to defeat a bill to halt Medicare cuts affecting doctors.  (Just as a side note, if the fact that Olympia Snow voted to get healthcare out of committee and onto the Senate floor, makes that a bipartisan vote and signals cooperation, isn’t this vote bipartisan?)   The tactic here was to keep this aspect of healthcare out of the healthcare reform bill as it would increase the cost of the bill and make it harder to pass the bill.  The change that was voted down will have to be dealt with in some way in the near future, but evidently some Congressmen did not want to be a part of pulling the wool over the public’s eyes in terms of passing this separately.

The link provided above to Thomas.gov has the specifics of the vote.  The hope was that the passage of this legislation would convince doctors in the AMA to support the larger healthcare reform package that Congress is putting together. 

Harry Reid is, of course, blaming the Republicans, but if all the Democrats had voted for halting cuts in Medicare reimbursement fees, the measure would have passed.  It was defeated in a bipartisan manner–not along party lines.