WASHINGTON — Sen. Charles Schumer said Sunday that President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are considering "alternatives" to a bipartisan healthcare bill amid continuing opposition from Republicans.
Schumer said Obama and Democratic leaders are "bending over backwards" to win Republican support for a bill. "It's looking less and less likely that certainly the Republican leadership in the House and Senate will want to go for a bipartisan bill," he said.
The options include passing a bill with just a few Republican votes or passing a bill using the so-called reconciliation process, which would require only 51 votes, said Schumer, D-N.Y. The president and his advisers have started devising a strategy to pass a measure by relying only on the Democratic majority in each house of Congress, according to a source who spoke last weekon condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, an independent senator whom Democrats count on in the health-care debate showed signs of wavering Sunday when he urged Obama to postpone many of his initiatives because of the economic downturn.
"I'm afraid we've got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy's out of recession," said Connecticut's Sen. Joe Lieberman. "There's no reason we have to do it all now, but we do have to get started. And I think the place to start is cost, health-delivery reform and insurance-market reforms."
The Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and advance a measure to a yes-or-no vote. Senators fromboth parties said that Democrats might use a voting tactic to overcome GOP opposition, abandoning the White House's goal of bipartisan support for its chief domestic priority.
Democrats control 60 votes, including those of two independents, but illness has sidelined Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. The party's leaders also cannot be assured that their moderate members will support every healthcare proposal.
"I think it's a real mistake to try to jam through the total health-insurance reform, healthcare reform plan that the public is either opposed to or of very, very passionate mixed minds about," Lieberman said.
Kennedy, one of the major proponents of a health-care overhaul, has missed most of the recent debate because of cancer. Both Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and John McCain, R-Ariz., said Kennedy's absence has taken a toll on the process.
"He had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations," McCain said.
A move by Democrats to seek a partisan bill may provoke a backlash from Republicans and weaken public support for a health-care overhaul, Obama's top domestic priority. It might also result in watered-down legislation.
Hatch said passing a bill on reconciliation would be "an abuse of the process."
The overhaul effort has been stalled by disagreement over whether to create a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers, a mandate that employers cover workers and whether to impose potentially unpopular new taxes that could include a surtax on the richest Americans or a levy on the most generous health plans.
Americans are "rightly skeptical" about the president's plan and a price tag that could reach $1 trillion, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
"They have produced a measure that they cannot sell evento their own members," the Kentucky Republican said in an emailed statement. "We'd like to start over with a genuine bipartisan approach," he said, citing bipartisan agreement on ending junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, promoting wellness programs and creating tax advantages for individuals who purchase insurance.
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., also suggested that a fresh start was needed.
"Bringing up of the healthcare situation in the midst of recession, the unemployment problems ... was a mistake," Lugar said. "For the moment, let's clear the deck and try it again next year or in subsequent times."
Hatch and Schumer debated on a news program Sunday about whether Obama will needto abandon the so-called public option, a litmus test for many in Obama's Democratic base, in order to get a bill passed.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have called the public option essential to any final bill. Obama, at an Aug. 15 town-hall meeting in Colorado, said the public option is "just one sliver of" health legislation.
Schumer said Obama isn't backing away from the public option.
"I believe at the end of the day we'll have a public option," he said. "What is the way to bring costs down? The good oldfashioned way is to bring competition. It is indeed essential to getting the costs down, which is our number one problem."
Hatch said he hopes Obama will drop the effort.
"The president realizes the public option isn't the last answer to everything," he said. "If we go to a public option, tens of millions of people will go into the government plan."
"The costs of the government plan will be astronomical," and those costs will be transferred to individuals who have private insurance, he said.
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, both pivotal memberson the Senate Finance Committee, urged Obama to drop the public option.
"If you have a public option and you eventually get to one option then there's no choices," Grassley said. "Choice of different plans is what we want to preserve."
Conrad and Grassley promoted a plan to create health cooperatives, or networks of health insurance plans run by the customers they serve, as an alternative to a public option.
"If you have to get to 60 votes you cannot get there with a public option," said Conrad, who also cautioned the bill must cost "significantly less" than current drafts in order to pass. The coop proposal "is the only proposal that has bipartisan support," he said.
Both senators warned against using reconciliation to achieve a bill.
"It does not work very well," said Conrad. "It was designed solely for deficit reduction."
Grassley said the legislation is too important to force through without Republican support.
"This is such an important issue," he said. "It ought to be done on a broad bipartisan basis."
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean called the co-op proposal a "political compromise" that in the past "mostly hasn't worked."
Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter, who left the Republican Party this year to become a Democrat, said that while support for the president's handling of health care has dropped because of "misinformation" about the proposals being considered by Congress, there's a "good chance" for a bipartisan plan.
"I do not think it is in trouble," Specter said, referring to the overhaul effort. "I think it is in a period of analysis and reanalysis."
Lieberman and Lugar appeared on CNN's State of the Union, while Hatch and Schumer appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. Conrad and Grassley spoke on CBS' Face the Nation, McCain on ABC's This Week and Specter on Fox News Sunday.
Information for this article was contributed by Ed Chen of Bloomberg News and by Douglass K. Daniel of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1, 5 on 08/24/2009