Snowe Urges Obama Drop Public Tactic In Health-care Overhaul Tactic
Snowe, one of six negotiators on the Senate Finance Committee, said that to gain more Republican support, President Barack Obama should explicitly drop the idea of a federally backed insurance program to compete with private insurers such as Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna Inc.
Obama and Democrats in Congress are trying to extend coverage to the 46.3 million uninsured Americans and curb health-care costs that account for about 18 percent of the U.S. economy. The president began a push this week to win Republican support and ease some Democratic uncertainty about spending $900 billion over a decade to overhaul a health-care system that he says is at a “breaking point.”
“Ive urged the president to take the public option off the table,” Snowe said yesterday on the CBS “Face the Nation” program. “Its universally opposed by Republicans.”
Snowe is a key member of the Senate finance committee, the last of five congressional panels to complete health-care legislation. Committee chairman, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, has led the only effort to reach a bipartisan agreement on health-care legislation and has struggled for months to attract Republican backing.
Seeking Republican Help
Democratic leaders said yesterday they need Republican support for a bill. “We need their help,” Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and member of the Senate leadership, said on NBCs “Meet the Press.”
“Wed like to have it,” Durbin said. “If they do not, we are still going forward.”
Obama, in an interview broadcast yesterday on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” said “so far, we havent gotten much cooperation from Republicans.”
Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who is one of the six Finance panel negotiators, told “Fox News Sunday” they were “pretty close” to reaching an agreement.
Baucus said earlier this week that if negotiations with the three Republicans on his committee fell through, the panel would start to consider his bill without Republican support. He said he expected it to be ready by today or tomorrow.
Baucus plan would charge annual fees of $6 billion for insurers, $4 billion for medical-device makers, $2.3 billion for drugmakers and $750 million for clinical laboratories to fund the legislation. The legislation would cost less than $900 billion over 10 years.
Instead of a public option, it would include health co- operatives that would give private insurers “non-profit competitors but would not be government-run,” Conrad said. It would also require most Americans to get insurance or pay a fine and would allow states to form compacts starting from 2015 to sell health insurance across state lines, a Republican priority.
Even so, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said his party probably wont accept the Senate Finance Committee plan. “I just do not believe theyre going to have Republican support on this kind of bill,” the Utah Republican, a member of the finance committee and the Senates health committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
In a Sept. 9 address to Congress and at a rally Sept. 12 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Obama said that while he still backs a public plan, he is open to other ways to create more competition in the insurance market.
Democrats on the Sunday talk shows echoed Obama and downplayed the importance of a public option. “What the president said to both Democrats and Republicans, to Republicans, we need to have that choice and competition, two ideals that quite frankly theyve always fought for,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on CNNs “State of the Union.”
Means to an End
“And for our Democratic friends, the public option is a means to an end, but it is not all of health care,” Gibbs said.
Republicans object to a public plan, which they say will eventually crush private insurers because of the governments negotiating power. “I think the public option is dead, its probably been dead for a long time,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on Fox.