SHE VOTED FOR IT! She voted for it! After months of being wooed, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, the most important woman in America - nay, the entire universe - voted yea Tuesday on the Senate Finance Committee's health-care-reform bill. It passed 14-9.
Snowe is the only Republican senator to vote for health reform. She deserves great credit for resisting crushing pressure from fellow Republicans to vote no. So, at least for a day or two, the president has something he can call "bipartisan." But it's a limited time offer. Snowe made it clear that if the final bill is too different after being merged with a bill passed by the Health Education Labor and Pension Committee - she may be outta there.
For the sake of our long twilight struggle for meaningful reform, we hope that the final bill is indeed very different from the Finance Committee version: For a moment of bogus bipartisanship, Olympia Snowe succeeded in adding provisions that would seriously dilute it. Examples:
No public option: Bills from four other committees include a government-administered option to provide a modicum of competition to insurance companies that right now exercise monopoly power. The Finance Committee's bill does not. Instead, it goes with nonprofit cooperatives that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would be ineffective.
Want more evidence that a strong "public option" is essential? Check out a "report" from the insurance industry that came out Monday: It said that, if health reform passes, insurance premiums would go up astronomically. Why? Because the insurers would raise them. The report, commissioned by the American Health Insurance Plans, was so misleading about the costs and possible savings of health-care reform that even the company hired to do the research disowned the conclusions.
The AHIP report also proved without a doubt that the so-called "trigger" for a public option - Snowe's favorite approach to reform - is a farce. A "trigger" would make us wait years to see if we can trust private insurerers to lower costs and if not, a public alternative could be "triggered." The AHIP report eliminates the suspense: the industry just told us what it's going to do.
Disincentives to hire low-income people. The Finance Committee bill would force employers who don't offer health insurance to pay a fee - up to $4,000 - for each worker who receives government subsidies to purchase coverage from a health-insurance exchange. But the company would pay no fee if a worker doesn't need a subsidy because his or her family income is higher - if the worker has a spouse or no children, for example. What a perfect incentive to not hire people from low-income backgrounds.
Race to the bottom. The Finance Committee bill would allow health insurers to sell policies across state lines and supposedly "increase competition." That's not what would happen. Instead, insurance companies would be released from state insurance regulations. The policy could lead to insurers locating all their business in states with the most lax consumer protections. As Delaware created a haven for credit-card companies, a couple of states would do the same for insurance.
Still, after what seems like an eternity of talking about health-care reform, the debate now begins in earnest. The antics of the summer "town hall" screamers have been followed by honest analysis, and it's clear that a government-run alternative is key to lowering health costs. If we keep up the pressure, President Obama will get a bill to sign that contains a public option. That won't make Olympia Snowe happy, but it would mean the world to millions of ordinary Americans.