Senate Committee Passes Health Reform, Wins One Republican Vote

The Senate's Finance Committee approved its health care bill, as it was expected to do -- finally putting this fifth congressional version of health reform to the overall Senate. It's a step awaited for months as the health debate has raged within Congress and within the U.S. public. And the most closely watched senator on the committee -- Olympia Snowe, the lone Republican that was still considering supporting the bill -- did cast her vote in favor of the legislation.

"When history calls, history calls," Snowe said. Though the bill earned the Maine Republican's vote, she said, "There are many many miles to go on this legislative journey."

The committee vote -- 14-9 -- was otherwise down party lines.

Snowe said that because this isn't the final version of the reform bill, she hopes the eventual compromise bill maintains the cost score that this one had from the Congressional Budget Office -- totalling $829 billion in spending over the next decade. "I would hope that we could maintain the integrity of the score of this package," she said during the final debate before the vote. "That's going to be critically important."

Snowe's vote could end up being vital to bypass a Republican filibuster possibility in the Senate as the overall body considers a future compromise bill. At this point, three reform bills await a massive merger in the House and two other bills -- including the Finance bill, which is the only one without the so-called "public option" -- await the same process in the Senate. Snowe cautioned counting on her vote for that bill. "My vote today is my vote today," she said. "It doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow."

The pre-vote committee debate in the Senate featured a series of Democrats slashing at the health insurance industry's release of a cost report -- detailing increased cost potentials for consumers under the reform bill introduced by Sen. Max Baucus, the committee's chairman -- on the eve of the vote. America's Health Insurance Plans had put out the PricewaterhouseCoopers study that it commissioned, which suggested major increases to consumer health care premiums in the next decade (BestWire, Oct. 12, 2009).

"Frankly, the insurance industry ought to be ashamed of this report," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "There's an old saying: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., called the report "one last effort to sink health reform by playing yet another fear card."

"How convenient that they came forward at the 11th hour," he said. "Suddenly insurers have conjured up a deeply flawed report."

Baucus stuck to broad strokes. "My colleagues, this is our opportunity to make history," he said. "Now is the time to get this done." And he was quick to praise Snowe's willingness to support the bill, calling hers a "very thoughtful statement."

"It'll be well remembered," he predicted.

But the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, said the GOP lawmakers "were rebuffed at every step." He said the legislation, as it approaches compromise with Sen. Edward Kennedy's bill passed through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is going in the wrong direction. "This bill is already moving on a slippery slope to more and more government control of health care."

Sen Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said this isn't the bill that the Senate will see later. "The real bill is being written behind the darkness of closed doors," he said.

After the vote, Hatch kept up the criticism. "It's going to cost us an arm and a leg," he said. "It's going to disrupt the practice of medicine."