Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) will sit down with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and other key members of the upper chamber on Tuesday to begin divvying up jurisdiction on healthcare reform.

“The healthcare system is broken for individual Americans and it’s straining our economy,” said Baucus, who called for immediate action on health reform.

On the occasion of his first appearance in the Senate in four months, Kennedy, too, vowed to move a healthcare overhaul in 2009. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m looking forward particularly to working with Barack Obama on healthcare,” he said Monday.

Baucus, who issued a comprehensive framework for reform last Wednesday and spoke to President-elect Obama about healthcare over the weekend, plans to meet with Kennedy, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee chairman; Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa); and HELP Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), he said during an address at the Brookings Institution.

“I want to work with all the committees — and I mean that,” Baucus said. “I don’t know if it’ll be one bill or whatnot,” he added.

Baucus also said he plans to collaborate with his House counterparts and Obama’s administration.

Kennedy, who favors a one-bill strategy, began laying groundwork for the Senate Democratic health reform effort during the summer. The longtime advocate for universal healthcare is recovering from treatments for a brain tumor.

But it was Baucus who laid down the first marker when he released a “white paper” on health reform last week. Despite lacking Kennedy’s celebrity and national profile on health issues, Baucus chairs a powerful panel and has considerable experience on major healthcare legislation.

Jurisdictional squabbling contributed to the failure of the Clinton administration’s first-term health reform effort.

The chairman of the Finance Committee at the time, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), was famously resistant to the detailed plan submitted by the White House, but he was not the only Democrat who resented Clinton’s top-down approach nor the only congressional committee chairman who wanted to put his signature on the bill that crashed soon after takeoff.

An agreement on how to carve up the territory in 2009 could be crucial to the outcome of the health reform effort in the upper chamber.

Republican Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), who sits on the HELP Committee, emphasized that the process will have great influence on whether health reform gets off the ground — and whether it reaches its destination.

“I don’t see this as a product that just comes out of one committee. I think that it’s a collective product that comes together from committees on both sides of the Hill,” Burr, who is up for reelection in 2010, said at the Brookings event.

“Max has taken everything that’s been talked about on the Hill and thrown it in the white paper,” Burr said. “It didn’t necessarily narrow down the way that we go; it opened up the opportunity for everyone to play. If that’s the way we proceed forward, we have a chance.”