Health Care Update

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Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus held a session with reporters this morning at the Kaiser Family Foundation offices in Washington to give us an update on where things stand with health care reform. Here’s my account of it for TIME.com.

Baucus told us that the debate over health care reform is going to be a wide-ranging one, and that “everything has got to be on the table — everything.” So I asked him the question that has often been raised here in the Swampland comments section: What about single-payer, a government-financed system that would be like giving Medicare to everyone? Apparently, that one doesn’t fit on the table:

“America is not ready for single-pay,” he said. “We are a bit different from people in other countries. We’re not Europe. We’re not Canada. We’re America…I think we need to come up with a uniquely American solution.”