Two proposals for public health care options were defeated Tuesday in the Senate Finance Committee, substantially reducing the likelihood that a liberal-supported public option will go through in the long run, The Washington Post reported.
A public option would create government-run health care for those who did not want to use private insurance. All the Committee’s Republicans and several of its Democrats voted against the plans, The Post reported.
Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who voted against the options, said he supports the public option but is concerned including it in the main reform bill could lead to a Republican filibuster, according to The Post.
Democrats including President Obama are facing the conflict of whether to fight for the public option or concede its impending defeat in order to see the reform’s larger goals succeed, but the public option is expected to remain under discussion.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has yet to decide whether to incorporate the public option into the combined bill that will go before the Senate; if he does not, supportive senators or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., may seek to reinsert it in later negotiations, according to The Post.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s senior Republican, said the government would be a ‘predator’ rather than a fair alternative in health care, The New York Times reported.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who also voted against the proposals, said in The Times that these defeats prime the legislature ‘for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage.’
He is designing this compromise with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.
More optimistic Democrats, such as Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Finance Committee was too a harsh environment to judge the public option’s actual prospects by, and that it would have better luck in negotiations later, The Times reported.
Though there is ‘a lot to like’ about the public option, Baucus said in The Times, Democrats must be realistic about the future of the legislation and the narrowing likelihood that they will have the necessary 60 votes to beat a Republican filibuster.
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