Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, unable to reach a deal with Republicans in health care, are considering alternatives to a bipartisan bill, Senator Charles Schumer said.

Schumer, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday, said Obama and Democratic leaders are “bending over backwards” to win Republican support. “It’s looking less and less likely that certainly the Republican leadership in the House and Senate will want to go for a bipartisan bill,” he said.

The options include passing a bill with just a few Republican votes or passing a bill using the so-called reconciliation process, which would require only 51 votes, said Schumer, a Democrat. The president and his advisers have started devising a strategy to pass a measure by relying only on the Democratic majority in each house of Congress, according to a source who spoke last week on condition of anonymity.

A move by Democrats to seek a partisan bill may provoke a backlash from Republicans and weaken public support for a health-care overhaul, Obama’s top domestic priority. It might also result in watered-down legislation.

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said passing a bill on reconciliation would be “an abuse of the process.” He also said that Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat who has been absent from the daily negotiations as he battles brain cancer, would have worked with Republicans to reach a compromise that was “the best of both worlds.”

Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, speaking on CNN, called it “a real mistake to try to jam through” the total health overhaul package when the public is “nervous” about it.

Lieberman, an independent, favors an incremental approach to health care overhaul, comparing it with other great changes such as the civil rights movement. He said the focus should be on bringing down costs.

Public Option

While the Democrats control 60 seats in the Senate, enough to quash Republican efforts to block action on the bill, they can’t rely on all those votes because of the illnesses of two lawmakers, Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

The overhaul effort has been stalled by debates over whether to create a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers, a mandate that employers cover workers, and disagreement over whether to impose potentially unpopular new taxes that could include a surtax on the richest Americans or a levy on the most generous health plans.

Americans are “rightly skeptical” about the president’s plan and a price tag that could reach $1 trillion, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Litmus Test

“They have produced a measure that they cannot sell even to their own members,” the Kentucky Republican said in an e- mailed statement. “We’d like to start over with a genuine bipartisan approach,” he said, citing bipartisan agreement on ending junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, promoting wellness programs and creating tax advantages for individuals who purchase insurance.

Hatch and Schumer debated on the news program yesterday about whether Obama will need to abandon the so-called public option, a litmus test for many in Obama’s Democratic base, in order to get a bill passed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have called the public option essential to any final bill. Obama, at an Aug. 15 town hall meeting in Colorado, said the public option is “just one sliver of” health legislation.

Bringing Competition

Schumer said that Obama isn’t backing away from the public option.

“I believe at the end of the day we’ll have a public option,” he said. “What is the way to bring costs down? The good old-fashioned way is to bring competition,” said Schumer. “It is indeed essential to getting the costs down, which is our number one problem.”

Hatch said he hopes Obama will drop the effort.

“The president realizes the public option isn’t the last answer to everything,” he said. “If we go to a public option, tens of millions of people will go into the government plan.”

“The costs of the government plan will be astronomical,” and those costs will be transferred to individuals who have private insurance, he said.

Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, both pivotal members on the Senate Finance Committee, urged Obama to drop the public option.

“If you have a public option and you eventually get to one option then there’s no choices,” Grassley said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “Choice of different plans is what we want to preserve.”

Health Cooperatives

Conrad and Grassley promoted a plan to create health cooperatives, or networks of health insurance plans run by the customers they serve, as an alternative to a public option.

“If you have to get to 60 votes you cannot get there with a public option,” said Conrad, who also cautioned the bill must cost “significantly less” than current drafts in order to pass. The co-op proposal “is the only proposal that has bipartisan support,” he said.

Both senators warned against using reconciliation to achieve a bill.

“It does not work very well,” said Conrad. “It was designed solely for deficit reduction.”

Grassley said the legislation is too important to force through without Republican support.

“This is such an important issue,” he said. “It ought to be done on a broad bipartisan basis.”

Later in the program, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean called the co-op proposal a “political compromise” that in the past “mostly hasn’t worked.”

Bipartisan Plan

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who left the Republican Party this year to become a Democrat, said that while support for the president’s handling of health care has dropped because of “misinformation” about the proposals being considered by Congress, there’s a “good chance” for a bipartisan plan.

“I do not think it is in trouble,” Specter said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the overhaul effort. “I think it is in a period of analysis and re-analysis.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Heidi Przybyla in Washington at hprzybyla@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 24, 2009 06:36 EDT