Senate Passes Health Care Overhaul Bill

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: December 24, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.
A History of Overhauling Health Care
Senate Roll Call: Health Care Bill
The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats a step closer to a goal they have pursued for decades. It clears the way for negotiations with the House, which passed a broadly similar bill last month by a vote of 220 to 215.
If the two chambers can strike a deal, as seems likely, the resulting product would vastly expand the role and responsibilities of the federal government. It would, as lawmakers said repeatedly in the debate, touch the lives of nearly all Americans.
The bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $871 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
President Obama said after the vote that the health care bill was “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act” was adopted and that it represented “the toughest measure ever taken to hold the insurance companies accountable.”
The budget office estimates that the bill would provide coverage to 31 million uninsured people, but still leave 23 million uninsured in 2019. One-third of those remaining uninsured would be illegal immigrants.
If the bill becomes law, it would be a milestone in social policy, comparable with the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. But unlike those programs, the new initiative lacks bipartisan support. Only one Republican voted for the House bill last month, and no Republicans voted for the Senate version.