WASHINGTON – The Senate Finance Committee Tuesday approved its health-overhaul measure, pushing a revamp of the U.S.’s health-care system closer to reality than it has been in decades. The vote was 14-9, with Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine the only Republican to join the 13 Democrats on the panel. Snowe indicated earlier in the day that she would support the measure.

The Senate Finance panel, led by Chairman Max Baucus, becomes the last of five congressional panels to act on a health-overhaul bill, and it marks the biggest step forward yet for President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Baucus-proposed 10-year, $829 billion plan would require all Americans to purchase insurance and aims to hold down spiraling medical costs over the long term.

The legislation that passed the other House and Senate committees did so without a single Republican vote.

The Finance Committee bill is designed to extend coverage to tens of millions of Americans now without insurance. Among other things, the measure would expand eligibility for Medicaid, the health program for the poor, and it would create new tax subsidies to help individuals and families comply with a mandate that nearly every American carry insurance.

Senate Democratic leaders must now merge the Finance bill with a more liberal measure approved by the Senate health committee.

Among the issues on the table: whether the legislation should include a government-run health plan. As it stands, the Finance bill doesn’t include one. Instead, the measure would create a network of nonprofit health cooperatives to compete with private insurers.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), said Monday that the merger “process will hopefully only take a couple days.” But he added that the blended bill would then “be carefully vetted” with all Senate Democrats and analyzed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, steps that would push back debate in the full Senate until the week of Oct. 26.

In the House, Democratic leaders must nail down details of legislation, bridging differences between the party’s liberals and moderates on issues including whether to create a government health plan. A bill isn’t expected on the House floor until late October. Once both the House and Senate act, a final bill must be forged and pushed through both chambers again.

Clinching the vote of Snowe was a huge victory for Democrats, who spent months trying to win bipartisan support for the bill. “Is this bill all that I would want?” she asked the panel earlier Tuesday. “Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls.”

Democratic Sen. Max Baucus (left) speaks while Republican Sens. Charles Grassley (center) and Orrin Hatch listen during the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing Tuesday on the health-care bill.

The committee’s morning session consisted of the senators on the panel giving statements and asking occasional questions of Douglas Elmendorf, the Congressional Budget Office director, and Thomas Barthold, chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.

On Monday, insurers ratcheted up concerns about the sweeping Finance Commitee bill. A report released Monday by America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, said the Finance bill would impose stiff costs on consumers. Among other things, the report said a family health-insurance policy that costs $12,300 today would increase to $25,900 on average by 2019 under the bill, more than under current law.

During Tuesday’s committee session, Democrats pounced on the AHIP report. “The insurance industry ought to be ashamed,” Sen. John Kerry told the panel. “It’s a powerful argument for why we ought to have a public plan.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s ranking Republican, complimented Baucus, a Montana Democrat, for his efforts to find bipartisan agreement on the bill. But the Republican said the bill bore an increasingly partisan imprint.

“I don’t blame anyone on this committee, but I do blame people outside this committee for that process not working,” Grassley said. “We can now see clearly that the bill continues its march leftward.”

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