Obama, Congress easing debate on public option

WASHINGTON — The White House and members of Congress on Sunday played down an immediate role for a government health insurance option and turned attention to regulating insurers, with the goal of lowering costs and ensuring coverage regardless of medical condition.

In President Barack Obama’s prime-time speech to Congress last week, he said the "time for bickering is over” and a plan for the government to sell insurance in competition with private industry was "only a means to that end and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.”

Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said Sunday the public option idea would help provide coverage to the estimated 45 uninsured Americans without insurance.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who could be her party’s only senator who votes with the Democrats on health care, believes choice and competition can be ensured without a government plan.

Snowe said a better bet for now "as the means for injecting competition” are nonprofit insurance cooperatives, designed to compete with private industry and give consumers more choices.

Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, contended the White House was not ready to accept that Congress would reject the public option, though he, too, said it was one solution, not a make-or-break choice.