Senior Senate Republicans finessing their election-year message are emphasizing that their conference will need to take a more prominent role on healthcare to win sorely needed independent voters in their uphill bid to retake the majority in 2008.

“I think Iraq was the No. 1 issue on people’s minds in 2006,” said Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), a close adviser to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in an interview with The Hill. “And healthcare has replaced Iraq as the No. 1 item of anxiety and concern.”

“From a Republican point of view, we want to put together four words that usually don’t go together — universal access and private sector,” Alexander said. “It’s one of our main objectives next year.”

With polls generally showing voters trusting Democrats more than the GOP on healthcare issues, Republicans say they can’t afford to lag in the debate. The issue is particularly sensitive for Republicans after they took a pounding this year from Democrats because of President Bush’s repeated vetoes on an expansion of the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which is intended to cover children from low-income families. Democrats said the White House and congressional Republicans are denying health insurance for 10 million children.

“I think Democrats will use that as an issue,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who sparred with his party’s leaders in pushing for the bipartisan SCHIP expansion. “I think most Republicans want SCHIP, but they wanted it to work right.”

Now that Bush is on the verge of signing an extension of the current program through March 2009, Republicans see an opportunity to put this year’s SCHIP debate behind them.

“After a big controversy, we came together and made a bipartisan decision to extend existing law for 18 months,” McConnell said at a Wednesday news conference. “So that’s just a perfect example of what I’m talking about. That’s the way you accomplish things around here.”

The healthcare debate along the presidential campaign trail could drown out the Senate GOP’s message, but Republicans say concrete action on Capitol Hill will need to be taken to overcome Democratic critiques on the issue.

Behind the scenes, Bennett is teaming up with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to build broad bipartisan support for a bill that would make all individuals, except military personnel and those under Medicare, enroll in a private healthcare plan administered by a state-based agency. Under the bill, the government would subsidize the premiums for lower-income families, and insurance companies could not deny coverage or drive up prices because of someone’s health history, occupation, gender or age.

“Republicans don’t use the language of universal healthcare because it’s code for a single-payer government-run system,” Bennett said. “Now, I’m perfectly willing to embrace universal coverage as long as it’s understood that it’s not a single-payer government-run system, because I do endorse the goal of every American [being] insured.”

Wyden, a member of the Finance Committee, which oversees the issue, says Bennett’s support goes a long way since he was one of the prominent Republicans railing against the healthcare proposal that was derailed in the early years of the Clinton White House. Five other Democrats and six other Republicans, including Alexander, are co-sponsoring the measure.

Wyden says the so-called Healthy Americans Act appears to be more politically palatable next year than SCHIP for Republicans, who believed that the Democratic children’s health plan improperly expanded the reach of the program.
“It gives Republicans the private-sector role for healthcare they are looking for, at the same time allowing Democrats to say everybody is going to be covered,” Wyden said of the Healthy Americans Act.

 Even some of the more conservative members of the conference have tried to get ahead of the issue, including Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who floated a bill last week to expand Americans’ access to low-cost healthcare without a government mandate.

Emphasizing expanded access to healthcare could be appealing to voters in a number of states where Republicans are in tight races. According to 2006 data compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, in Minnesota, where Sen.

Norm Coleman (R) is running for a second term, more than 440,000 people are uninsured; in Sen. John Sununu’s (R) New Hampshire, there are 137,000 people without insurance; in Maine, Sen. Susan Collins (R) faces more than 120,000 without insurance; and in Oregon, where Gordon Smith (R) is running for a third term, more than 615,000 people are uninsured.

 Similarly, in New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia, where there are three open seats, there are more than 419,000, 798,000 and 978,000 uninsured people, respectively.

In the interview, Bennett said that each candidate will have to determine which issues to emphasize in his or her respective campaigns, but he said that “Republicans in the Senate ought to talk about” healthcare next year.

McConnell has not handed his endorsement to the Wyden-Bennett bill, but he suggested that Bennett’s push could gain traction.

“When Bob speaks everybody listens,” McConnell said in a recent interview.