The Health Care Reform Debate...Who's Leading It?

MSNBC----


Sen. Chris Dodd (D)(Conn.) - With Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., sidelined by illness, Dodd is leading the Senate health committee's effort to design its overhaul legislation. It is inevitably going to be a slow process, Dodd (who's up for re-election) told colleagues, saying, "I never suggested this was going to be warp speed."

Sen. Max Baucus (D)(Mont.) - Baucus is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and architect of one of the bills that, with some modifications, is most likely to arrive on the president's desk. He has stressed paying for extending health coverage to the uninsured by taxing some workers' health insurance and by forcing hospitals and providers to become more
cost-effective.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,(D)(Calif.) -
Pelosi's clout with her 256 Democratic members may prove to be essential in getting a compromise bill passed in the House. She favors a "public option," a government-sponsored plan that would compete with private-sector insurers. "I have every confidence we will have a public option coming out of the House of Representatives. It will be a level playing field. For us to have substantial health care reform, this has to be part of it," she said.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R)(Iowa) - The senior Republican on the Finance Committee, Grassley (who's up for re-election) has worked closely with Baucus to design a bill that would gain some Republican support. He is not a fan of Obama's plan to let government plans compete with private ones. "There's a lot of us that feel that the government is an unfair competitor," Grassley said. "We have to keep what we have now strong, and make it stronger."

Sen. Kent Conrad,(D)(N.D.) - Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Conrad is the sponsor of a proposal to use a series of regional co-operatives, somewhat like farmer co-ops, as non-profit rivals for profit-friendly insurance companies. Conrad told the Washington Post it was necessary to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass any health insurance overhaul. He has warned about a government-sponsored insurance plan. "Virtually all Republicans are against the public option and some Democrats are," he said. "So how do you get to 60?"

Sen. Ben Nelson,(D)(Neb.) - A crucial Senate centrist who along with about six other like-minded Democrats may supply the votes to pass a bill, or might kill it by voting "no." A critic of the "public option," a government plan competing with private-sector insurers, Nelson has also said he might be open to some form of public option which would be "triggered in the event that there's no market available on the private side."

Sen. Olympia Snowe, (R)(Maine) - Snowe is a critical GOP centrist who often votes with the Democrats on significant legislation. She has voiced worries that high-cost areas of the nation, including her home state, would suffer disproportionately if Congress decided to tax employer-provided health insurance.

Peter Orszag, Office of Management and Budget - Head of the Office of Management and Budget, Orszag is largely responsible for making sure the Obama administration accepts the design of any insurance overhaul. Orszag said the resulting plan "must be deficit-neutral," and must require some real, quantifiable savings to offset the new federal spending that will be needed to cover the uninsured.

Douglas Elmendorf, Congressional Budget Office - As director of the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan budget scorekeeper for Congress, Elmendorf is in charge of the analysts who'll figure out whether the numbers in the health insurance blueprint add up. "Without meaningful reforms, the substantial costs of many current proposals ... would be much more likely to worsen the long-run budget outlook than to improve it," he said.

Karen Ignagni, America's Health Insurance Plans - Ignagni is president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the group that represents nearly 1,300 companies providing health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans. AHIP supports making all uninsured Americans living in poverty eligible for the Medicaid program -- which currently has wide coverage gaps in it. AHIP opposes a government-run plan for the non-poor, which it says would dismantle employer-based coverage and cost taxpayers too much money.

Richard Kirsch of Health Care for America Now - Kirsch is the leader of a Democratic-affiliated advocacy group Health Care for America Now -- a coalition of labor unions and others, including ACORN, the AFL-CIO, and MoveOn.org. The group calls for a federal health insurance plan that guarantees coverage without a private insurer involvement. It attacks the private-sector insurance industry as "beholden to Wall Street" and says it "puts corporate profits before people's health."

Sources: MSNBC, Politico, Reuters, Flickr, Huffington Post, Zimbio