Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, delivers opening remarks at his confirmation hearing as secretary-designate of Health and Human Services yesterday.

AP / Susan Walsh

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Tom Daschle, the secretary-designate of Health and Human Services for the Obama administration, won strong support from key senators yesterday as he pledged a bipartisan effort “to marshal the talent and energy necessary to at last succeed in making health care affordable and accessible for all Americans.”

But Daschle and the senators considering his nomination said little about the features of President-elect Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul plan that are bound to stir strong opposition. Republicans and the insurance industry are wary of Obama’s proposal to significantly expand public health insurance that would compete with the private market.

“The cost of doing nothing may be the most expensive option of all,” Daschle told senators at the first confirmation hearing of the new Congress. The former Senate Democratic leader noted that since the failure of the last big effort to overhaul the medical system, in 1994, the number of uninsured has grown from 37 million to 46 million Americans and the cost of medical care has soared. Health care now claims one dollar in every six from the average family budget — up from a dollar in every 15, he said.

Daschle promised that the new administration will move speedily to launch a retooling of the health-care system. He also pledged to work with Republicans and called national health-care reform “one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, set the tone for the hearing by telling Daschle, “I look forward to your early confirmation.” Convening his committee for the first time since he was diagnosed last spring with brain cancer, Kennedy called Daschle “an extraordinary nominee to lead the nation’s health-care agenda.”

Summing up the choice about health care that faces Obama and the 111th Congress, Kennedy quoted Daschle’s own words back to him. Upon departing the Senate after losing his seat in 1994, Daschle stated: “Will we honor the unique American ideal that we are responsible for passing this country on to a generation in the future that is better? Or will we forfeit the promise of the future for the reward of the moment?”

Prompted by Kennedy and Sen. Jack Reed, Daschle told stories from his national “listening tour” of a great popular hunger for a better medical system. He said he has been especially struck by “stories about personal bankruptcy” — ordinary Americans practically put on the street by the expense of trying to stay healthy.

Daschle said he has learned through his grass-roots inquiry that General Motors spends more on health care than on steel, Starbucks more than on coffee, and average families more than on anything but rent.

Reed praised Daschle’s support for finding ways to lure more doctors and nurses into primary care and for renewed emphasis on the preventive value of better immunization.

Reed said later in an interview that the health-care initiative could “start rolling” in the Senate as early as mid-March, in part because Kennedy and other leaders have been working on the issue for months with Obama’s team. Still, “health care is the most complicated issue in the world,” Reed warned. “It’s the ultimate Rubik’s Cube. You get everything right on this particular issue, then you turn it around and — oops! There are new problems.”

Republicans joined in the expressions of hope for bipartisan action on health care. “We will disagree” during the upcoming debate, cautioned the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming. But Enzi — who teamed up with Kennedy to help enact landmark mental-health legislation in the last Congress — stressed the health committee’s history of working across party lines.

Daschle suggested that he understands what killed the ambitious health-care overhaul that was attempted the last time a Democratic president took office with his party in majority control of both houses of Congress.

Daschle said a solution cannot be imposed on the medical system “from the top down,” and he promised to fashion the overhaul through “an open and transparent process.” Daschle noted that after “health-care reform collapsed in 1994” there was widespread criticism that the initiative “took too long” and that the deliberations were “too opaque.” Reed stays home

•Sen. Jack Reed and other senators have missed a scheduled trip to southwest Asia with Vice President-elect Joe Biden because of voting obligations. Reed was supposed to be part of a Senate delegation that accompanied Biden, who left yesterday on the fact-finding mission. But Biden’s office said in a statement that newly scheduled Senate votes this weekend kept Reed and the others in Washington. (AP)

jmulligan@belo-dc.com