The Senate this morning approved legislation that would make the broadest changes to the U.S. health-care system in decades, Bloomberg reported.

The Senate vote was 60-39, with all Democrats and two independents backing an $871 billion measure that would extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Republicans opposed the legislation, saying it would raise taxes, widen the federal deficit and hurt private companies.

The legislation “brings us toward the end of a nearly century-long struggle to reform America’s health-care system,” President Obama said at the White House before leaving for a Christmas vacation in Hawaii. “We can’t doom another generation of Americans to soaring costs and eroding coverage and exploding deficits.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, called the early morning vote “a victory for the American people.”

His Republican counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, pledged to continue fighting a measure he said doesn’t solve the problem of skyrocketing health-care costs. “My colleagues and I will work to stop this bill from becoming law,” he said.

A conference committee must resolve differences between the Senate bill and a $1 trillion health-care bill passed Nov. 7 by the U.S. House of Representatives on a 220-215 vote.

The Senate bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $871 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, The New York Times reported.

The budget office estimates that the bill would provide coverage to 31 million uninsured people, but still leave 23 million uninsured in 2019. One-third of those remaining uninsured would be illegal immigrants, the Times said.

Click here to read key provisions of the legislation.