The Senate Finance Committee passed a long-awaited $829 billion health care bill Tuesday by a 14-9 vote.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was the lone committee member to cross party lines, breaking with other Republicans to vote for the measure. All the committee’s Democrats supported the bill.
The vote represents a pivotal step forward in the contentious health care debate. The Finance Committee is the last of five congressional panels to consider health care legislation before debate begins in the full House of Representatives and Senate.
If the House and Senate both manage to pass health care overhaul bills, a conference committee then will negotiate a final version requiring approval from both chambers before going to President Obama for his signature.
Snowe, one of the senators in the bipartisan “Gang of Six” that initially negotiated the committee’s bill, was considered one of the few GOP senators likely to support a bill emerging from the Democratic-controlled Congress.
“People do have concerns about what we will do with reform, but at the same time they want us to continue working — and that is what my vote to approve this bill out of committee represents,” Snowe said during the committee’s final deliberations on the measure.
“Is this bill all that I would want? Far from it. Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls. And I happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of Congress (taking) every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issues of our time.”
Now the Finance Committee has cleared the bill, the focus will quickly shift to the closed doors of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office.
The Nevada Democrat must merge the conservative-leaning Finance Committee legislation with a more liberally drawn bill approved by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
The primary difference between the Finance Committee bill and the health committee legislation involves a government-run insurance company — the public option.
The health committee bill provides for a robust public option designed to compete head-on with insurance companies and force them to rein in costs.
The Finance Committee ditched the public option in favor of nongovernment-run health care co-ops, a nod to conservative Democrats and Republicans who fear a government takeover of the health care system.
Other key differences include whether employers should be forced to provide health insurance to their employees and how generous government subsides should be to assist low- and middle-income people to pay for health insurance.
Reid’s goal is to emerge with a single bill that can win at least 60 votes in the Senate, meet President Obama’s ambitious promise to change dramatically the way health care is paid for and provided, and cost no more than $900 billion over the next 10 years. Senate aides expect that effort to take a couple of weeks.
Joining Reid in the decision-making will be Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, the Finance Committee chairman; Sens. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Tom Harkin of Iowa, senior Democrats on the health committee; and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
Other key players are likely to weigh in, most notably Snowe, a centrist long considered as the Democrats’ best hope for getting GOP support.
Republican leaders, who have criticized the bill for its size and scope, won’t be involved. One senior Republican leadership aide recently quipped that she would be in her office with her feet on her desk during the talks because she sure wasn’t going to be invited in to offer suggestions.
Then the Senate must find common ground with the House of Representatives, and so far there appears to be little — House Democrats have said they won’t pass a bill that doesn’t include a public option.
Leaders in the House have been meeting over the past months in an effort to merge three bills passed out of committees and bring down projected costs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, has said she expects a final version for consideration by the full chamber soon, but she hasn’t provided a specific timetable.
In general, both parties agree on major aspects in overhauling health care, among them capping consumers’ annual out-of-pocket expenses for health care and halting insurance company practices of denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. They also agree on creating incentives for preventive health care to help lower overall costs.
The Democratic leadership in both chambers want to bring liberals, progressives and conservatives in the party together to use its majority in both chambers to pass a bill this year.
In the Senate, Reid needs 60 votes to overcome a possible Republican filibuster. There are 60 seats in the Democrats’ Senate caucus, but some independents or moderates are unlikely to support a public option or some of the more costly overhaul plans.
Reid could implement a legislative option known as reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to pass a bill with 50 votes instead of 60. However, Republicans have promised a “minor revolution,” in the words of GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, if Democrats resort to that rarely used tactic.
Snowe has proposed a possible compromise: a “trigger” mechanism that would create a public option in the future if specific thresholds for expanded coverage and lower costs are not met. The trigger has yet to be included in any proposal.
(Source: CNN)
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One Response
Senator Snowe complained during the Bush years that the Republican party is losing their fiscal conservative ways and she was 100% right given all the spending there was. So what has she done since Bush left office? She voted for the stimulus bill and now for the health care reform bill. Both are hardly what you would call being fiscally conservative.
Just another political hypocrite (or is that an oxymoron).