Kerry on health care: Obama's approach prevents repeat of '93 - '94, co-ops don't work

MS. ROMANO: Okay. Health care reform. You also sit on the Senate Finance Committee, which is marking up the bill right now. Democrats lost two votes on public option yesterday. Is it dead?

SENATOR KERRY: No, not yet. I think you have to let this fight take place on the floor of the Senate and see where the larger votes of the Senate may be, and even then, depending on what the Senate does, you still have the House where you have four committees that have embraced a public option, and you have the White House that supports something. We're not exactly clear.

MS. ROMANO: Senator Baucus said he doesn't see any way to get 60 votes on public option.

SENATOR KERRY: And I think it's very tough. Given the votes we had on the Democratic side yesterday, I think it's going to be very tough to get the votes on the floor.

MS. ROMANO: Are there alternatives to keeping the market competitive without public option?

SENATOR KERRY: There are, and we're going to look at a few of those. One of them is this discussion about the cooperative, but I'm not convinced that that will, in fact, work, Lois.

I think that, you know, maybe Senator Snowe and I have talked together about the possibility if we can't get public option on the floor, of a trigger that might put it in place down the road if, in fact, the private sector doesn't deliver what they say they're going to deliver. So you kind of have this incentive that pushes people increasingly towards reform.

MS. ROMANO: There have been a lot of criticism of the President, a lot of pundits saying that he has not been specific enough about what he wants in the legislation.

SENATOR KERRY: I think the President was unbelievably specific when he spoke to the Congress asking for a special session to speak on health care, and he said what he wants in the bill.

I've been through this before. I did this in '93, '94, and I saw what happens when the White House sends you a prepackaged product and says this is the deal and you don't get Congressmen and Senators to invest and get the people who have worked on this for a lifetime on their committees to invest.

I personally believe that the way the President has approached this, by allowing the committees to work through, will in the end produce a product, and the Congress is now invested in that product, and I think the President has weighed in appropriately. Maybe he let a month go by that he might have you know, you can argue about that one, and he could have jumped in conceivably a little earlier, and so you can argue about it, but I don't think it's an argument worth having.

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SENATOR KERRY: No, not yet. I think you have to let this fight take place on the floor of the Senate and see where the larger votes of the Senate may be, and even then, depending on what the Senate does, you still have the House where you have four committees that have embraced a public option, and you have the White House that supports something. We're not exactly clear.

It's been in the works for a while and now, according to senior Capitol Hill staffers, it's a done deal: The final budget resolution will include a "reconciliation instruction" for health care. That means the Democrats can pass health care reform with just fifty votes, instead of the sixty it takes to break a filibuster.

The deal was hatched late afternoon and last night, in a five-hour negotiating session at the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. A trio of White House officials were there: Rahm Emanuel, Peter Orszag, and Phil Schiliro. Also present, along with Reid, were House Budget Chairman John Spratt and Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad.

The reconciliation instruction specifies a date. That date, according to one congressional staffer, is October 15.