By Ravi Bhatia, Talk Radio News Service

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Or.) and Reps. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Jim Cooper (D-Tn.) said Tuesday that infusing the health insurance market with competition would be the best way to bring down health care costs for most Americans.

“We’ve got to open up the exchanges to a broader array of people, both employers and employees,” Wyden said at a panel discussion hosted by The New Republic magazine. “That’s how we’re going to respond to people making $66,000 a year who are going to look at the [Senate] Finance Committee Bill and say that it’s not going work for [their families].”

The discussion occurred the day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that the current draft of the health care bill will include a public option with an opt-out provision for individual states. In theory, giving Americans the option to choose a government-run health care plan would drive down the costs of private insurers by creating competition. The Health Care Exchange would allow those who already have insurance to upgrade to better plans then the ones they already have using the program, further encouraging insurance companies to lower prices and raise their coverage quality standards.

“As these bills are being drafted, only ten percent of the people in America will ever be allowed to shop for any option, whether it’s public or private,” Cooper said. “In other words 90 percent will be stuck with what they’ve got. So why don’t we allow people to upgrade to get a better deal?”

Cooper added, “As far as the public option is concerned, I’m for one, we can have a good one, we can have one that’s affordable for the individual family and for the system as a whole, but all this effort is for naught if we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate.”

On Tuesday, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who is often considered the one Republican who might vote in favor of health care reform legislation, responded to Reid’s announcement, saying that she would not support a bill that includes a public option. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) also announced Tuesday that he would block Reid’s plan as long as it includes a publicly funded insurance plan.

According to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the House may introduce their health care bill by the end of this week.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Monday that the public option, saddled with a provision that will allow states to individually opt-out, will be included in the final draft of the Senate’s health care reform legislation.

Although Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the only Republican on the Senate Finance Committee to vote in favor of moving the legislation out of committee, does not support a public option, Reid stated that the Senate has to move on. The Majority Leader added that he hopes that Snowe and other Republicans will support health care reform after being given the chance to submit their own amendments. (0:24)

 

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Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) stated Tuesday that she will vote to pass the America’s Healthy Future Act through the Senate Finance Committee. However, Snowe warned that although she would be supporting the bill Tuesday, that does not mean she will support the legislation that reaches the Senate floor.

“My vote today is my vote today, it doesn’t forecast what my vote would be tomorrow,” said Snowe. (0:07)

 

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Julianne LaJeunesse, University of New Mexico

The “Gang of Six”, a number of Finance Committee Senators hesitant to adopt the public option, met today at Chairman Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) office to continue talks on health care reform. According to Baucus, the Senators are close to wrapping up their discussions.

Baucus described the meeting as productive and noted that the six Senators actually have found common ground on a number of policies.

“Today’s meeting was quite useful and we all recognize that there’s so much we agree on,” Baucus said. “I want to underline that point. I made that many times… it’s true today as well.”

Committee Member Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one of the Gang of Six, said the group covered many subjects, including preparation for a meeting with Governors tomorrow. Conrad said looking at health care reform effects at the state-level is important because state and federal governments could align under the latest draft of health care reform.

Conrad said that while the vast majority of the responsibility for the newly-insured, or at least those eligible for insurance, would lie on the federal government, states will have some role in sharing the financial burden.

“States would be given resources to help them experiment on what works best [under the plan discussed today,] including a certificate of merit program… a whole series of options open to them… on how to best make a determination on what works effectively.”

Conrad also said the Senators discussed how to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving health benefits, as well as how to receive assurance from the federal government that abortions would not be financed through the proposed health care reform package.

The Gang of Six includes: Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s (D- Mont.); Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R- Iowa); Committee Member Olympia Snowe (R- Maine); Committee Member Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.); Committee Member Kent Conrad (D-N.D.); and Committee Member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)

Coffee Brown, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News

When blue collar unions and green environmentalists discussed how alternative energy is a path to new, high quality jobs, the Blue Green Alliance was born, according to Dave Foster, the Executive Director.

Foster notes that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former Sen. John Warner (R-VA) have sponsored separate Cap-and-Trade bills, and, along with Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (R-ME), still support some form of carbon tax.

Europe and Japan have far lower per capita energy usage, he said, which means “through efficiency, we can pay for an awful lot of of these global warming reductions.”

Still, “I find it a little odd that a certain section of the Republican party has chosen to wave the banner of anti-science,” Foster said.

America is already feeling the economic effects of climate change, Foster said, and gave the example of the loss of 4,000 jobs in the aluminum industry as decreased amounts of snow pack formed in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest over the past 20 years. Hydroelectric dams depend on snow melt for power. As that diminished, electricity became prohibitively expensive.

“The cost of doing nothing about global warming will far, far exceed the cost of doing something,” Foster said, while praising the thousands of steel-working jobs gained in manufacturing clean-energy wind turbines.

Foster said that alternative energy jobs tend to put skilled people back to work in familiar jobs.

“We’re not engaging in massive re-training, we’re engaging in a massive recall to work… On exactly the kinds of projects that they’ve been trained to do before,” he said.

“The Blue Green Alliance is a strategic national partnership between labor unions (the “blue” in “blue-collar”) and environmental organizations (the “green”) “ (http://www.bluegreenalliance.org/site/c.enKIITNpEiG/b.3416603/k.DD10/About_BGA.htm)

Coffee Brown, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News

Dave Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance, points out that separate Cap-and-Trade bills have previously been sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) Former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who still support it, and that Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both (R-Maine), also support the measure.

00:52

 

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Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) says that oil is a basic commodity and that a response plan must be developed because without oil to heat their homes, people could freeze to death. (0:41)

 

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Visible frustration concerning increased oil prices was displayed by Senators at a meeting of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. To prepare for the winter, the committee met to discuss the effect of increasing oil prices on the cost of home heating oil.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) presented statistics showing the rising cost of home heating oil in Maine. According to Snowe, the price of home heating oil has increased 135 percent in her state while income has only increased 17 percent. Snowe projects that Mainers will have to spend $5,000 to heat their homes with a per capita income of $33,000. Snowe said that many “could freeze to death,” adding that many throughout the United States will be unable to afford to heat their homes during the winter months.

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) said one can attribute the rising price of home heating oil to the rising cost of crude oil. In reference to the White House, Kerry stated that a stronger administration would be doing more to assist Americans. He also said he finds it shocking that Americans continue to waste energy by using electricity when it is not needed after 30 years of gas shocks and efforts to counteract global warming.

Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Petroleum Reserves David Johnson said in his testimony that the price of home heating oil can be lowered by increasing domestic production of oil by drilling on continental shelves and in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR.) Kerry told Johnson that oil from the ANWR would only lower American gas prices two cents per gallon at full production and that the United States only has three percent of global oil reserves. Kerry continued, saying the United States’ oil supply is not large enough to lower international prices and that the rhetoric employed by Johnson and others has “worn short.”