As Panel Votes Today, Democrats Look Ahead
By Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Senate Finance Committee will hold a landmark vote on health-care reform legislation Tuesday that is expected to underscore the deep partisan divisions that have emerged and hardened over five months of debate.
With few, if any, Republicans expected to support the bill sponsored by Chairman Max Baucus (Mont.), Democrats have already begun their own internal negotiations aimed at reconciling the various measures passed by House and Senate committees. As part of that exercise, lawmakers are reviving ideas that had been discarded, including a new approach to a government insurance plan that appears to be gaining support with party moderates.
The finance panel's vote marks a watershed in the quest to overhaul the country's health-care system. Not since Theodore Roosevelt proposed universal health care during the 1912 presidential campaign has any such bill come this far.
As the action shifts to the House and Senate floors in the coming weeks, a handful of major issues -- and many smaller ones -- remain unresolved. The two chambers disagree on how to pay for the legislation, with the Senate preferring a tax on high-value insurance policies as the main revenue-producing measure, and the House a surcharge on millionaires. Liberal Democrats want to penalize companies that do not provide coverage to their employees; moderate Democrats would take a less punitive approach. And many lawmakers remain unconvinced that the insurance policies Congress would require people to buy would be affordable.
(More here.)
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Senate Finance Committee will hold a landmark vote on health-care reform legislation Tuesday that is expected to underscore the deep partisan divisions that have emerged and hardened over five months of debate.
With few, if any, Republicans expected to support the bill sponsored by Chairman Max Baucus (Mont.), Democrats have already begun their own internal negotiations aimed at reconciling the various measures passed by House and Senate committees. As part of that exercise, lawmakers are reviving ideas that had been discarded, including a new approach to a government insurance plan that appears to be gaining support with party moderates.
The finance panel's vote marks a watershed in the quest to overhaul the country's health-care system. Not since Theodore Roosevelt proposed universal health care during the 1912 presidential campaign has any such bill come this far.
As the action shifts to the House and Senate floors in the coming weeks, a handful of major issues -- and many smaller ones -- remain unresolved. The two chambers disagree on how to pay for the legislation, with the Senate preferring a tax on high-value insurance policies as the main revenue-producing measure, and the House a surcharge on millionaires. Liberal Democrats want to penalize companies that do not provide coverage to their employees; moderate Democrats would take a less punitive approach. And many lawmakers remain unconvinced that the insurance policies Congress would require people to buy would be affordable.
(More here.)
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