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WASHINGTON – Democrats had little time to savor their weekend Senate health care victory, as two of the lawmakers who voted to move the debate forward Saturday night indicated Sunday that they will not vote to pass the package if it includes a government-run insurance program.
Despite the success in the test vote, the fragile consensus in the Democratic caucus will face its greatest test yet as the debate moves to the Senate floor and Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., struggles to stave off internal schisms. The cracks in the 60-member caucus are most obvious over the public insurance option.
One member of the Democratic caucus, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., reiterated Sunday that he would oppose any bill that contained a public option. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Lieberman called such a government-run plan “radical.”
“We have a health care system that has real troubles, but we have an economic system that is in real crisis,” Lieberman said. “And I don’t want to fix the problems in our health care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis.”
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., another centrist who supported the move to continue debate but has made it clear he has many objections to the legislation as written, restated his opposition to a public plan.
“I don’t want a big-government, Washington-run operation that undermine the private insurance that 200 million Americans now have,” Nelson said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Moderate Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., also have deep misgivings about the Senate language – a public option with a state opt-out clause – and have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness about other approaches that are being considered.
Some liberals in the chamber were just as insistent that they would press to keep the bill largely intact.
“I don’t want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country – when the public option has this much support – that (a public option is) not going to be in it,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Reid announced after the vote that the Senate would begin deliberations on the $848 billion bill Nov. 30 and would consider amendments through most of December. What Democrats lack in consensus, they make up for in determination to pass a bill. Not for years has the Senate seen legislation as big as the health care measure – weighing in at more than 2,000 pages – move forward at such a steady, if plodding, pace.
“We have to finish it in the Senate or it’s going to be maybe a long lunch break over Christmas,” Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said on “Meet the Press,” suggesting that lawmakers may be forced to cut into their holiday recess. “We’ve got to really focus, refocus our attention – all of our attention on getting people back to work.”
