By Ryan Grim
Sixty-four years ago, President Harry Truman stood before a joint session of Congress and called on the body "to assure the right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness."
Forty-nine years later, President Bill Clinton made the same demand.
On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Congress moved closer to achieving that goal than it ever has. The hold-out Senate Finance Committee voted by a 14-to-9 margin to move the fifth and final health care reform proposal through the conservative panel.
The package, coming in at under $900 billion over 10 years, is the least generous in terms of subsidies for working- and middle-class Americans to purchase health insurance, and it does not include a national public health insurance option. But the bill would dramatically reorganize the nation's system of health care and health insurance and stands as the foundation on which Democrats hope to build a strong reform package with negligible GOP support.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was the lone Republican to support the package. "My vote today is my vote today. It doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow," she said, although her vote does keep her at the negotiating table and at the center of the health care reform debate. Snowe risked marginalizing herself with a no vote.
With the bill having officially moved through the panel, deliberations will migrate to the Capitol, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will huddle with Senate leaders to merge the finance bill with a more generous version from the health committee, which passed earlier this year.
Snowe stressed that her support for the final bill would depend on its resemblance in total cost, at least, to the finance bill. "I'm probably more vigilant about that point now than I've ever been," said committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), addressing her concern. Baucus added that he was ready to fight changes to "the so-called merged bill."
Republicans, meanwhile, stand in lock-step opposition -- minus Snowe -- to the reform effort. They know their history: the year after both Truman and Clinton's failed efforts, the GOP retook control of Congress and any hope of reform faded to minority status.
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