After months of bipartisan negotiations, and significant concessions intended to win Republican support, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has unveiled a draft of his health care reform bill, and, for now, no Republicans on the Senate Fiance Committee are endorsing it, even tentatively. Not even Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). And one Senate Democratic aide says it’s highly unlikely that she’ll support the bill at the finance committee stage.
But that won’t deter Democrats from wooing her anyhow.
One of Snowe’s main concerns is that the financing scheme Baucus proposed, which involves taxes on high end insurance plans, could disproportionately harm Maine consumers, who pay some of the highest health insurance rates in the country.
Calls to Snowe’s office asking if she plans to offer amendments to alleviate that and other concerns–and whether the adoption of such amendments would win her support–have thus far gone unanswered.
Baucus and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid say they’ll move the bill out of committee with Democrats only in the event that she doesn’t play ball at this point, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the concessions Baucus made will be undone. More likely, Snowe will continue to be the focal point of Democrats’ negotiations as they try to scrape together 60 votes to circumvent an expected filibuster.
And they may need her sooner than anticipated. One potential problem is that Democrats expect Republicans to invoke a 60 vote requirement just to bring a bill to the floor. Snowe’s vote would be crucial at that point.
Which means it’s probably fair to conclude that, when Reid merges the Finance Committee bill with the more liberal HELP committee bill, he’ll be giving Snowe a significant say over which provisions she thinks should be adopted in the final package.
In other words, no matter what happens, the Snowestakes continue.
