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Hagan and health reform

Sen. Kay Hagan, a Greensboro, has been doing weekly conference calls with North Carolina reporters for a while now, mostly on Wednesdays.

Today's came after the ten freshmen Democrats in the Senate took the floor and said in various ways that they supported doing something with health care.

You can watch Hagan's floor speech by clicking here.

Update: The link above is from CSPAN. This is the video from Hagan's YouTube channel.

Hagan said during that speech that if health care reform doesn't come about the average American family will spend roughly half their income on insurance premiums by 2016.

"I don't know how people would pay for mortgages and save for colleges spending that kind of money," Hagan said later on the conference call.

Hagan at once insists that health reform is necessary and that the cost of inaction is too great, but won't jump in whole-heartedly in support of any particular piece of legislation. (For those who haven't been paying attention to all this, Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, adamantly opposes the genre of health reform proposals now being considered.)

Aside from saying she was committed to a bill that didn't increase the deficit, made sure pre-existing conditions weren't an obstacle to coverage and insured folks who aren't insured, Hagan didn't explicitly endorse or condemn any particular proposal. She allowed that the bill the Senate Finance Committee today met her no-new-deficit requirement but stopped way short of saying that she'd vote for it.

The N+O's Rob Christensen pushed her for a yes or no answer on whether she supported the Finance Committee bill. Hagan responded (accurately) that the committee was running through 500 or so amendments. Her strongest statement on the measure was, "I think we're getting on the right track."

Neither would she commit on a process question I asked her.

"It is my strong preference that it move through the regular order (of business)," Hagan said of the health care bill. "Regular order" would require that 60 senators vote in favor of going forward on the measure.

There has been talk of Senate leaders circumventing that rule and voting the bill through under "reconciliation."

I asked if she would vote for a bill if it came through reconciliation.

"I'm hoping for still bipartisan support of this bill," she said.

Right, but if that hope doesn't come to fruition, would the fact a measure is moving through reconciliation stop her from voting for the final product?

"At the end of the day we will have a bill that will be sent to the president for signage," Hagan said, adding, "It's my strong preference that it move through regular order."

I asked again, and she started, "We're closer now than we've ever been before on health care reform…"

For those keeping score at home, she was asked at least three times if she would vote for a bill if it came up under reconciliation and didn't answer the question directly yes or no.

Of course, this could all be a bit of a moot point if Massachusetts gets its act together and appoints a replacement for Ted Kennedy and all 59 other Democrats stay on board with the health care reform effort.