The Senate Finance Committee shouldn't feel any pressure to come to an agreement on a bipartisan health-care reform bill before President Obama's Wednesday night speech to a joint session of Congress, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) told reporters on Tuesday.
The moderate Republican is considered the Democrats' last hope for a bipartisan bill. Sens. Mike Enzi (R-Wy.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) also arrived for the day's discussion and pledged to hear the Democrats out, but repeated comments they made in August suggesting they're not interested in an agreement that Democrats could live with.
Grassley has said that even if he can agree to something he wouldn't vote for it unless the bulk of his colleagues were on board -- which simply won't happen. Enzi, meanwhile, spent the break assuring home-state voters he wasn't negotiating or compromising.
Snowe said that the gang shouldn't "draw any inferences from the standpoint that the president is going to be delivering a speech this week -- tomorrow night -- so therefore we have to conclude our discussions and reach an agreement by tomorrow night. I don't see those endeavors as mutually exclusive, frankly."
The committee chairman, Max Baucus, released a framework of his proposal for the group to discuss Tuesday. The three Republicans declined either to endorse or reject the proposal on their way into the meeting.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said that there was much in the proposal that he could go along with but that he wasn't sure where his Republican counterparts stood. "I don't know anything about their position," he said.
Bingaman, however, has never been the reluctant negotiator. The third Democrat, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), declined to tell a reporter if he could support the Baucus proposal.
Snowe said much of the negotiations will focus on costs.
While consensus has been reached on some issues, she said, "other issues we're still working through, especially in terms of costs and how they would be implemented...when it comes to Medicaid and costs to the states. Affordability is a critical issue both to individuals, small business and to states. So we have to really evaluate some of those issues that could incur greater costs."
The Baucus proposal comes in at under $900 billion over ten years. More robust reform packages come close to a trillion or $1.2 trillion -- meaning the difference between the baseline Baucus proposal and the more mainstream Democratic one is roughly $20 billion per year: pocket change for Congress.
Snowe, however, said the group wants estimates of the costs of Baucus' proposals before any agreement can be reached. "I think it's more important for us to take the time to work through these issues, get the accurate estimates and in the explicit legislative language so we have a thorough understanding of what will be contained in any agreement or document," she said.
Though the group shouldn't feel pressured by Obama's speech, said Snowe, the members will be listening.
"I think it's important to be able to listen to the specifics of what the president is going to be proposing in his address tomorrow night that works in conjunction with what we're doing or it doesn't. I don't expect the president to agree with everything we're doing or vice versa. But that's all part of a constructive process going forward, so I hope we haven't set these deadlines in concrete that we have to have an agreement by tomorrow night because the president is offering a speech," she said.
The Baucus proposal does not include a public health insurance option or a trigger to create one, which is Snowe's preferred policy -- it relies on nonprofit cooperatives instead. Snowe said she has not recently talked with her Republican colleagues about the trigger proposal but has done so in the past few months.
Enzi, who spent much of the August recess telling constituents he was not seriously negotiating with Democrats, arrived second to last, saying he was hoping to work something out.
"I'd hate to think that I spent all these hours doing this for nothing," he added.