ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Democrats’ bid to remake the nation’s health care system is hitting major snags in the Senate, where the first day of mark-ups in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has Republicans accusing Democrats of supporting runaway government spending.
At the same time, the Senate Finance Committee is delaying consideration of its own health care bill until after the Fourth of July congressional recess, amid growing concerns among members of both parties about the plan’s cost.
On ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a senior member of the HELP committee, said that while it’s impossible to know the full impact of a bill that’s only partially written, he’s estimating that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s bill would cost between $2 trillion and $4 trillion over 10 years.
“See, we don’t even have the whole bill,” Alexander told us. “We don’t have the part about the employer mandate. We don’t have the part about expansion of Medicaid — that’s several hundred billion dollars. We don’t have the part about a government insurance program. And if you take the Congressional Budget Office letter that they sent to us, and you go out three or four years until the part that we do have is actually in place, it’s more like a $2 trillion addition to the debt. So, the Kennedy bill is probably $2-to-$4 trillion on top of the debt we already have, which is absolutely impossible for us to do as a country.”
The Congressional Budget Office this week estimated that Kennedy’s bill would cost $ 1 trillion over 10 years. That estimate prompted the White House to point out that President Obama is not endorsing any specific measure.
On “Top Line,” Alexander ruled out support for a public option, which he said “would lead us to a Washington takeover of healthcare.”
He also dismissed a proposal from former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, and Howard Baker, that would include a new fee on larger businesses that don’t offer health coverage to their employees, in an effort to pay for health reform.
“I don’t like the idea of a tax on businesses,” Alexander said. “I mean, Tennessee’s a big auto state. We have a lot of auto suppliers. They do in Michigan and the Midwest as well, and every one of them is trying to think about, ‘How can I keep my costs down to keep my jobs from moving to Mexico?’ So if we put a big cost on the top of employers, we’re going to lose jobs in this country. We already saw what happened to the auto industry in the Midwest.”
Watch our full interview with Sen. Alexander, where we also get his take on Judge Sonia Sotoyayor and the scandal involving Sen. John Ensign, HERE.
Also today, we talked with liberal blogger Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake.com about her efforts — working alongside prominent conservative bloggers — to block additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Could President Obama’s plan to remake financial regulations offer another opportunity for this kind of unlikely teamwork?
Watch the interview with Jane Hamsher HERE.
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