Senate Finance Committee Passes the $829 Billion Health Care Bill

The Senate Finance Committee voted 14-9 to send its version of reform legislation to the Senate floor, becoming the last of five panels to act on legislation marking the biggest advance so far toward health care reform. 

The battle over health care reform has only just begun. Republicans are still overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals, saying they are too expensive and intrusive.

A new report by a health insurance lobbying group said the overhaul will drive up costs on families’ annual premiums by as much as $4,000 over the next decade.

An analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office last week gave a more positive review of the Senate Finance Committee’s bill. 

According to political analyst Charles Krauthammer, the CBO report “is extremely misleading, and the reason is that the taxation that will support the plan starts almost immediately, but the benefits only kick in in three years. That means that if you calculate over ten years, you’ve got ten years of revenues into the system, only seven years of expenditures, so of course you’re going to have a surplus.”

But Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe ended weeks of speculation today by breaking party ranks and putting her support behind the Democrats’ health care overhaul.

Health care legislation that passed in three House Committees and one other Senate panel did so without a single Republican vote.

The committee’s passing of the bill marks a significant advance, but there are many more steps in the health care reform debate. 

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives must prepare a bill, and then act again on a merged version before the President could sign the legislation into law. 

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid will now begin closed-door talks to merge the bill with one approved by the Senate Health Committee earlier this year. Reid will sit down with several fellow Democrats including Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, new health panel Chairman Tom Harkin and Senator Chris Dodd, who led health committee deliberations on the bill, to work out differences in the two measures.

The most important decision will be whether to include a government-run “public” insurance option backed by Obama and congressional liberals. The Finance bill does not include it and three Democrats, including Baucus, voted against it in committee. The Health panel’s bill does include it. Reid also must navigate competing views on the level of government subsidies to help individuals buy insurance and a proposed requirement that employers offer health coverage to employees.

Reid’s goal will be to find a spot where he can placate liberal Democrats without driving off moderates — all in hopes of holding together the Democrats’ 60-vote majority in the 100-member U.S. Senate. That is the number needed to overcome Republican procedural hurdles. “In the end, it’s about finding a proposal that can get 60 votes,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley.

Once Reid reaches a compromise, the measure will be submitted to the Congressional Budget Office for another estimate of costs and eventually moved to the Senate floor for debate, perhaps later this month.

Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives are also working to merge three separate healthcare bills passed by House committees, and submitted a version last week to congressional budget analysts for cost estimates. Their goal is to move a bill to the floor in the next few weeks.

If the Senate and House each pass a healthcare overhaul, a conference committee composed of members from each chamber will be appointed to negotiate the differences and combine the two measures. The public insurance option is certain to be an issue there as well — all three House bills include it.

Once the conference committee settles on a single bill, the House and Senate vote again on the revised measure. If approved, it will be sent to Obama for his signature or veto. Obama has set a goal of the end of the year for final action.

As the Senate Finance Committee passed its health care bill out of committee without a public option Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood on the other side of the Capitol insisting again that the House will pass a bill with a government-run insurance option.

“I am for the public option. That will be the House position, and that will be the position we will go to the conference to fight for,” Pelosi said.

According to The Hill newspaper, the biggest risk for Republican Senator Snowe in lining up with Democrats is risking her own shot of securing the top GOP slot on the Commerce Committee when Texas GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison resigns her seat this fall to run for governor. The key now is whether Snowe’s support is only temporary.

The Americano / Agencies

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