First, the good news: the Senate Finance Committee passed its health reform package (the “Baucus Bill”) today, 14 votes to 9, with one Republican, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) (pictured), crossing party lines to support the measure:
A key Senate committee easily approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health-care system Tuesday afternoon, clearing the way for President Obama’s top domestic initiative to advance to a historic debate before the full Senate…
Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine broke with her party and joined all 13 Democrats on the committee in voting for the package, which would spend $829 billion over the next decade to make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans who would otherwise go without coverage, according to congressional budget analysts.
In a speech from the dais, Snowe said the measure does not address all her concerns. In particular, she said she is worried that the package would force people to buy insurance that remains beyond their means. But with the cost of insurance premiums skyrocketing, she said, the likely consequences of inaction are far more troubling.
Now that both major committees taking up health reform in the Senate (the other one being the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, known as the “HELP Committee” for short) have passed out versions of the bill, the debate in that chamber can move to the floor, where it can be debated by all 100 Senators. This is significant because it’s the first time in all the decades that Congress has debated doing something to fix our broken health care system that a bill has made it this far in the legislative process.
Now, the bad news: unlike the bill passed by the HELP Committee, the Finance Committee’s language does not include a public option.
That’s disappointing, but it’s worth noting that its absence from the Finance bill doesn’t mean it is gone for good — the Finance and HELP bills will have to be merged into a single piece of legislation before it can come to the floor, and it’s entirely possible that the public option (and other progressive-friendly provisions) will be brought over from the HELP Committee bill into the merged bill. Ezra Klein has details on how the negotiating process to decide the contents of the merged bill will work, if you’re interested.