Snowe says she'll support health care bill -- for now

By Lisa Wangsness and Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine was the lone Republican to support the 10-year, $829-billion bill that passed the Senate Finance Committee today by a 14-9 vote.

But Snowe also warned that her vote today is not an indicator of how she'll vote on the Senate floor, after the Finance bill is merged with another crafted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and after senators attempt to amend it.

Snowe said the bill is not perfect and that she still has concerns, chiefly about whether the bill makes insurance affordable enough. But she said the proposal accomplishes many long-sought bipartisan goals, such as prohibiting insurers from refusing to cover sick people or charging them higher premiums, and that she believes voters want action.

"When history calls, history calls," she said.

Quoting the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- "a fellow Mainer," she noted -- she said, "Great is the art of the beginning, but greater is the art of the ending."

"We should ... contemplate the decades of inaction that have brought us to this crossroads," Snowe told her colleagues.

"The status quo approach has produced a glaring common denominator, and that is, we have a problem that is growing worse, not better," she said.

Snowe likened the health care crisis to the Titanic, and the missed opportunity for the legendary boat's captain to move the vessel out of the way of danger. The difference is that "the captain did not know there was an iceberg. We do," Snowe said.

Snowe's vote is likely to give her more leverage with Democratic leadership during the merger and amendment process. Democrats desperately wanted at least one GOP vote to give a sliver of bipartisanship to the contentious bill, and may also need Snowe's vote to stop a potential filibuster. Democrats have 60 members in their caucus - technically enough to stop a filibuster - but conservative Democrats are balking at some elements of the developing bill, and Senator Robert Byrd's illness has made it unclear if the West Virginia Democrat will be well enough to attend the vote.