Senate Finance Comittee votes 14-9 for health care reform.

Today was the first in what this blogger believes will be a series of victories for health care reform. The Senate Finance Committee approved a bill for health care reform, commonly known as the Baucus plan. Now, it becomes time to merge the 5 separate bills together to craft the final product – and I’m betting it ends up with a Public Option.

Over the last month or so, the tides on the health care debate have been changing in favor of reform. Polls show most Americans support it (even with the Public Option), and more and more lawmakers are getting pressure from their constituents to support real reform. This vote, a day after a Big Health scare tactic concerning rate hikes seems to have failed, is historic.

In the spotlight is Republican Olympia Snowe, who broke with her own party to support reform.

“Is this bill all that I would want? Far from it,” Snowe told her colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee. “But when history calls, history calls.”

And that’s plenty good enough. Ironically, this move makes Snowe the only real maverick in the GOP today, a fact certain to irk many hard-line Republicans siding with those in the pockets of the insurance industry.

Thanks to yesterday’s attempt to scare the American people into supporting corporations which profit off of their illness, Big Health may have shot itself in the foot concerning the creation of the oft-cited Public Option. The tone today is one of great hope that such an option will make its way into the final reform bill.

Democrats didn’t shrink from voicing changes they’d like to see in the final reform bill, but their main target was the health insurance industry, which released a report Monday claiming that reform will increase health insurance premiums. “It’s one more indication that we’re on the right track,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said of the report, while Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said the “last-minute obfuscation” illustrated the need for a public option to keep insurers honest.

Republican House member John Bohner had this to say of the reform bill:

[He] said the requirement that all Americans buy health insurance amounts to a middle class tax hike. “The American people want reform,” Boehner said, “not a trillion-dollar experiment.”

This illustrates, of course, that after all these months the GOP still doesn’t get it. The people would much rather like a “trillion-dollar experiment” (although that’s not what’s been proposed in the least) over nothing at all; the GOP supports the latter, and people quickly tired of the No Party’s obstructionism.

The President commended those who worked on the bill passed today, but urged that it was less a time for celebration and more a time to get things done.

I commend the chairman and the committee’s members for their achievement and the example that they’ve set. And I look forward to continuing to work with Congress in the weeks ahead. We are going to get this done.

Thank you very much, everybody.