Snowe Urges Obama Drop Public Plan in Health Overhaul

-Nicole Gaouette

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.

NY Times

Take Public Option ‘Off the Table,’ Snowe Says

-Joseph Berger

David Axelrod, one of the president’s senior advisers, signaled the administration was remaining flexible about the option.

“I’m not willing to accept that it’s not going to be in the final package,” he said on “Face the Nation” as the debate over health care again dominated the Sunday talk shows. However, Mr. Axelrod suggested that Mr. Obama would not insist on including a public option if that meant giving up a chance to transform the way the nation insures its citizens’ health.

“But what he also said and what we’ve all said is that this is not the whole of health insurance reform,” Mr. Axelrod said of the president. “And 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 just — that is just getting worse.”

In other television appearances, several Democratic lawmakers also played down the necessity of devising a government-run health plan as part of a health-care package. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that there’s “more than one way to skin that cat” when it comes to lowering health care costs. And Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, said “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.”

A new government insurance has been roundly opposedby the health care and insurance industries, and Republicans have argued that it would create an alternative to employer-sponsored private plans that will lure millions of insured workers away and lead to a dysfunctional single-payer plan.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the Democrat from Louisiana, joined that chorus on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” arguing that a government-run health plan would “undermine the private insurance system that she said covered 55 percent of insured Americans.

“Let’s not revise the whole system, let’s build on its strengths,” she said.

Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has said in recent interviews that he cannot get the committee to support a government-run health plan. Instead, he said, the committee is coalescing around a bill that would expand Medicaid coverage to several income brackets above the poverty level and require all American to be insured through private plans or through the existing public plans of Medicare and Medicaid. Subsidies would be provided for those who could not afford medical insurance.