Rahm: Finance health bill no more important than other bills

The health bill to be passed out of the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday is no more important than the bills to be passed out of any other House or Senate Committee, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said this evening.

During an appearance on PBS's "Newshour," Emanuel called the Finance committee's 14-9 vote in favor of the final committee bill a "significant milestone," but rejected the notion that the final bill would necessarily resemble the one approved today.

"As it relates to this bill, this is not the more important bill as compared to any other bill," Emanuel said. "It is a bipartisan bill, achieves the objectives. That's also true of what Senator Dodd did in his committee. The House is now going to merge those three bills."

The Finance bill has been the only proposal in the five congressional committees to receive a Republican vote, but the chief of staff rejected the idea that wide gulfs separated the bills.

"But the differences are not as stark as you said," he explained. But we will merge those bills in the conference and come out with a single product."

Emanuel did say that President Barack Obama called each member of the FInance committee to have supported today's proposal, including Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who joined with the committee's Democrats, to thank them for their vote.

Obama "urged them on to keeping that momentum, that energy to going forward and working immediately in merging the two bills out of the Senate, so that it will be ready to go to the floor," Emanuel said.