By Noam N. Levey and Peter Nicholas , Tribune Newspapers|July 16, 2009
WASHINGTON - — WASHINGTON - - The Senate health committee, approving major health care legislation for the first time in 15 years, put forward a sweeping plan Wednesday to provide nearly every American with insurance regardless of income or medical condition and to create a government program to compete directly with private insurers.
The bill also would place new requirements on many employers to provide coverage.
The committee vote, along party lines, marked what President Barack Obama called "a major milestone" in his bid to revamp the U.S. health care system. Throughout the spring, the president successfully wooed many of the special interests that thwarted President Bill Clinton when he attempted a similar overhaul in 1993.
But there were ominous signs that the debate is moving into a new, more bruising phase in which insurance companies, hospitals and others fight to shape the details of legislative provisions that affect them.
California hospitals and insurers issued sharp warnings that a government insurance program could jeopardize patient care. And leading business organizations, many of which have been pushing for a health care overhaul, have stepped up their attacks on similar legislation that House Democrats introduced this week.
"It is clear that ... hospitals will not be able to maintain the level of services that they do today," Duane Donner, president of the California Hospital Association, said Wednesday.
And the National Federation of Independent Business, a historically conservative small-business group that is influential in the House, sent a letter to lawmakers saying that the bill "threatens the viability of our nation's job creators ... destroys choice and competition for private insurance, and fails to address the core challenge facing small business - cost."
But the dire predictions were contradicted by a preliminary Congressional Budget Office assessment of the public insurance option contained in the House bill. The CBO estimated that by 2019, just 9 million people nationally would get their insurance from the government plan, while more than 175 million people would get their coverage from private insurers.
The bill's overall cost would be $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion during the next decade, depending on changes to Medicare physician payments. It would impose a surtax on wealthy Americans, beginning with a 1 percent levy for couples earning $350,000 and rising to 5.4 percent on income above $1 million.
