Committee nears vote, with boost from Snowe

As the Senate Finance Committee moved towards a vote on its health care bill - expected this afternoon - its chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., implored lawmakers to "get the job done" and called the meeting a "historic moment," USA Today reports. "Passage would mark the biggest step forward yet for President Obama's top domestic priority," according to the report. "It is clear that the committee vote today is likely to fall largely along party lines" (Stanglin, 10./13).

One exception will be Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who said Tuesday she would support the bill in committee but withheld her support for future legislative action, the New York Times reports. "Is this bill all that I want? Far from it," Ms. Snowe declared. "Is it all that it can be? Far from it. But when history calls, history calls" (Herszenhorn, 10/13).

"The expected approval by Baucus' committee would push a remake of the U.S. health care system closer to reality than it has been in decades," the Associated Press reports. "Four other congressional committees finished their work before August and for months all eyes have been on the Finance panel, the one whose moderate makeup most closely resembles the Senate as a whole" (Werner, 10/13).

The New York Times is live blogging the panel's hearing today (Seelye, 10/13).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.