RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
President Obama's effort of overhaul the nation's health care system is just getting started, but you can already see battle lines being drawn, as NPR's Julie Rovner reports.
JULIE ROVNER: She'd only been on the job six days, but new Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn't miss a beat in her debut before the House Ways and Means Committee. She was quick to defend President Obama's proposal for a government-sponsored insurance plan as one alternative to private insurance. Republicans have been complaining that such a public plan would be an unfair competitor, but Sebelius says that depends how the plan is designed.
Secretary KATHLEEN SEBELIUS (Health and Human Services): Can you construct an unlevel playing field with a public option unfairly competing with private options? You bet. Is that the intention of the administration or the majority in Congress when they talk about it? I don't think so at all.
ROVNER: And she noted that more than 30 states already have public plans as part of their state health employee or children's health programs.
Secretary SEBELIUS: If you design the rules so there really is a level playing field, that private insurers don't have the advantage of cherry-picking the market and the public plan doesn't have the advantage of undercutting the costs and driving everybody out, it can work very effectively and does work very effectively across this country.
ROVNER: Meanwhile, in an effort to head off creation of a new federal insurance plan, private health insurers are asking for what only a few years ago would've been unthinkable - more federal regulation of their industry. Here's what Karen Ignagni, who heads the industry's top trade group, told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday.
Ms. KAREN IGNAGNI (President, America's Health Insurance Plan): We're not asking any individual to trust us. We're asking them to trust the government, because we're proposing very aggressive, comprehensive government regulation where we would be accountable, where it would be transparent and the rules would be fundamentally changed.
ROVNER: But there's another group that's not even at the table - those who want the government to be the sole payer of the nation's health care bills. A group of so-called single payer advocates disrupted the Finance Committee meeting Tuesday and got arrested for their trouble. Katie Robbins is with the group Healthcare-Now.
Ms. KATIE ROBBINS (Healthcare-Now): We decided to directly confront the Senators on the exclusion of a single payer advocate.
ROVNER: The protestors were charged with disorderly conduct and spent seven hours in jail at the Capitol police headquarters. They're facing a hearing on May 26. Health care hearings, meanwhile, continue next week.
Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.