SALT LAKE CITY — Republican Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said Wednesday that if Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy had been well, the two of them likely would have been able to forge a bipartisan health care reform bill.
Kennedy died Tuesday at his home on Cape Cod from brain cancer. He was 77.
The conservative Hatch and liberal Kennedy developed a unique friendship as political opponents and partners for three decades.
The pair regularly worked together on bills, including a federally funded program for those with HIV/AIDS, health insurance for lower-income children and tax breaks to encourage the development of medicine for rare diseases.
“We would’ve been able to put (health care) together because Teddy was the only Democrat who could move their whole base,” Hatch told reporters outside the federal building Wednesday. “If he finally agreed, the whole base would come along even if they didn’t like it.”
At last summer’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, Kennedy spoke of his illness and said health care was the cause of his life.
His death occurred precisely one year later, almost to the hour.
Hatch has been one of the Republican Party’s most vocal critics of health care plans proposed by Democrats and kept up the rhetoric Wednesday.
“We can’t go with some of the current plans. They’re just awful, and they all, well all the Democrat plans, lead to a single-payer system that would just be awful for this country,” Hatch said.
“If (Kennedy) was there, even though he would want a single-payer system and always wanted it, he would listen. I’ll put it that way.”
