Snowe Urges Obama Drop Public Plan in Health Overhaul (Update1)

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Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said there is “no way” a health-care overhaul that includes a public option can pass the Senate.

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 some 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.”

“I’ve urged the president to take the public option off the table,” Snowe said on the CBS “Face the Nation” program. “It’s universally opposed by Republicans,” Snowe said.

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.

Republican Help

Democratic leaders said today 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 NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We’d like to have it,” Durbin said. “If they do not, we are still going forward.”

Obama, in an interview broadcast today on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” said “so far, we haven’t 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 tomorrow or the day after.

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.

Cooperatives

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 won’t accept the Senate Finance Committee plan. “I just do not believe they’re going to have Republican support on this kind of bill,” the Utah Republican, a member of the finance committee and the Senate’s health committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

In a Sept. 9 address to Congress and at a rally yesterday 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.

Choice, Competition

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 they’ve always fought for,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“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 government’s negotiating power. “I think the public option is dead, it’s probably been dead for a long time,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on Fox.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine rejected the idea of a trigger mechanism that would start a public option if there’s not enough competition in the private insurance market.

Potential Delays

“The people who are going to be making the determination about whether the market’s competitive enough want the public option,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “So I think the trigger is just a delay.”

Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, a close Obama ally, said on Fox that the public option “has in some ways become a distraction.”

“The meat of the matter is that we’re losing 14,000 Americans from health insurance every day,” McCaskill said.

A Treasury Department report released yesterday found that about half of Americans under age 65 will lose their insurance coverage over the next decade. More than one-third will have no coverage for more than a year and about 15 percent go without health insurance in any given year, the report said.

The administration made another gesture to win over Republicans today when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius repeated the president’s promise that no federal funds will go to pay for abortions under any health-care legislation he signs into law. Obama made the pledge in his Sept. 9 address to Congress.

Loopholes

Republicans in the House have complained that the legislation had loopholes that would allow for federal funding of abortion, which is now forbidden by law. Sebelius said on ABC’s “This Week” that the president will toughen the language currently in the House bill to explicitly rule out the use of federal funds. “That’s what he intends that the bill he signs will do,” Sebelius said.

Obama, in the “60 Minutes” interview, reprised an offer he made last week in his address to Congress, saying he is willing to “consider any ideas out there” to reduce “defensive medicine, where doctors are worrying about lawsuits instead of worrying about patient care.” He also said “so far the evidence I’ve seen is that caps will not do that,” referring to limits on medical malpractice awards.

Obama told an estimated 13,000 people at the Minneapolis rally yesterday that he would fight opponents and special interests working to defeat a health-care overhaul, his top domestic priority. “I will not waste time with people who think that it’s just good politics to kill health care,” Obama said. “I’m not going to let people misrepresent what’s in my plan.”

The rally coincided with a Washington demonstration by tens of thousands of conservative protesters who waved signs with slogans such as “Keep Government Out of Health Care” to protest the health-care overhaul and the rising budget deficit. The protests were organized by the Tea Party Patriots group and the National Taxpayers Union, along with other conservative groups, and were promoted by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nicole Gaouette in Washington at ngaouette@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: September 13, 2009 19:00 EDT
By Nicole Gaouette
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Obama is already like Bush, he can't see his mistakes.

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Sep 13, 2:51 PM (ET)

By PHILIP ELLIOTT


WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House and its Democratic allies on Sunday tried to play down the role of a government insurance option in health care legislation as the party in power worked to reclaim momentum on President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

His spokesman described the public option as just one way to achieve Obama's goal of providing coverage to the estimated 45 uninsured Americans without insurance. His senior adviser contended the White House was ready to accept that Congress would reject the idea, though he, too, said it was an option, not a make-or-break choice.

Congressional Democrats took care to say the idea, backed by liberals and targeted by conservatives, is not a deal breaker in a debate that has consumed Washington for the summer and shows now sign of abating.

"I think that's a reasonable way to go. But I think it's important to stay focused on what we're trying to accomplish," said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs stressed Obama's commitment to choice and competition and declared the public option "a means to an end, but it is not all of health care."

Echoing that sentiment, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said the focus on this specific issue has become a distraction in a debate over how most people receive health care coverage.

"That's a small part of this," McCaskill said.

And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said there's "more than one way to skin that cat" when it comes to lowering health care costs, stopping short of insisting that the overhaul include a public option.

The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, said his committee was nearing an agreement on legislation that would extend coverage to most uninsured Americans.

Republicans, though, did not seem swayed.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said an alternative to the broad overhaul could be as simple as providing subsidies to the roughly 15 million Americans who he said truly cannot afford coverage.

"C'mon, we're living in the real world here," said Hatch, who serves on the Senate Finance Committee. "People all over the country don't want this."

The public plan is envisioned as being offered alongside private coverage through a new kind of purchasing pool called an insurance exchange. At least initially, the exchange would be open to small employers and people buying coverage on their own.

While there's strong support for a public plan among House Democrats, the votes appear to be lacking in the Senate.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who has proved a reliable collaborator with the White House, said Obama should just give up on the public option in favor of building consensus and that he should have done so during his Wednesday speech to Congress to bring Republicans on board.

"I think it's unfortunate, because it leaves open a legislative possibility that creates uncertainty in this process," Snowe said. "And I think it could give real momentum to building a consensus on other issues. I appreciate the fact that the president did demonstrate flexibility on the question in his speech Wednesday night, but it does leave it open, and therefore unpredictable."

The White House, however, was reluctant to let go completely.

"We should not let the whole debate devolve into this one question - circulate around this one question - and lose the best opportunity we've had in generations to do something very significant about a problem that ... is just getting worse," Axelrod said.

Obama kept up a steady weekend drumbeat of cheerleading for his health care plan in a campaign-style rally, on the radio and Internet, and on network television. He planned to continue the pace with more events designed to seize control of the health care debate following his address to Congress last week in which he urged Democrats and Republicans to come together.

On the president's agenda for the coming week was a speech Tuesday to the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh and an a health insurance address Thursday in College Park, Md.

In public, the president is working to energize his supporters and persuade those who have insurance that a health overhaul is just as vital to them as it is to those who currently aren't covered. Behind the scenes, the president's team and Democratic lawmakers are in intense negotiations aimed at cutting a deal that can pass Congress - with or without Republican backing.

GOP leaders said they agree with Obama that the current health insurance system needs a change, but argue his plans are too costly and won't work.

Shaheen, Gibbs and Feinstein appeared on CNN's "State of the Union." McCaskill, Conrad and Hatch spoke with "Fox News Sunday." Snowe and Axelrod appeared on CBS'"Face the Nation."