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| Obama pushing public option behind closed doors | |
| 2009-10-05 | |
| Despite months of seeming ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea in the weeks just ahead. Because the real objective isn't health care but the public option... President Barack Obama has long advocated a so-called public option, while at the same time repeatedly expressing openness to other ways to offer consumers a potentially more affordable alternative to health plans sold by private insurers. But now, senior administration officials are holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring to the Senate floor later this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides. Among those regularly in the meetings are Obama's top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, aides to Reid, and Senate finance and health committee staff, both of which developed health care bills. At the same time, Obama has been reaching out personally to rank-and-file Senate Democrats, telephoning more than a dozen lawmakers in the last week to press the case for action. Administration officials are also distributing talking points and employing other campaign-style devices to rally support for passing a bill this fall. The White House initiative, unfolding largely out of public view, follows months in which the president appeared to defer to senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill as they labored to put together gargantuan health care bills. It also marks a critical test of Obama's command of the inside game in Washington in which deals are struck behind closed doors and wavering lawmakers are cajoled and pressured into supporting major legislation. "The challenge is to go to the (Senate) floor, hold the deal," said Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist who was chief of staff to former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. But "they are more involved than people think. They have a plan and a strategy, and they know what they want to get and they work with people to get it." With the Senate Finance Committee wrapping up work on its legislation and moving toward a formal committee vote this week, senior Democrats in the House and Senate are furiously working on detailed compromises to ensure enough Democratic votes to pass health care bills out of the two chambers later this month. While Democrats hold majorities in both houses on paper, nailing down those majorities has not been easy -- particularly in the Senate, where Democrats need a 60-vote supermajority to head off a Republican filibuster. The party commands a 60-40 majority, including two independents, but several centrist Democrats have expressed reservations about parts of Obama's health care agenda. No issue has proved more divisive than the proposal to create a new national insurance plan operated by the federal government and offered to some consumers as an alternative to private insurance.
Just recently, two proposals to create a national government plan were defeated in the Finance Committee when Republicans and conservative Democrats voted against them. While those votes were viewed by some as the death knell of the public option, the White House and its congressional allies are under heavy pressure from the Democratic Party's liberal base to breathe life back into it. That has Democratic leaders looking for ways to insert some form of the concept into a Senate bill without jeopardizing centrist support. To that end, Obama is lavishing attention on moderate lawmakers while he continues to talk up the public option. | |
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| #4 That has Democratic leaders looking for ways to insert some form of the concept into a Senate bill without jeopardizing centrist support. Tie a public option clause into a bill to send more troops to Afghanistan. That way when Republicans oppose it, they can accuse them of not supporting the troops. Sounds like a 'behind-closed-doors' policy to me. |
| Posted by: Woozle Uneter9007 2009-10-05 15:23 |
| #3 This has nothing to do with insurance or health care and EVERYTHING to do with establishing huge bureaucratic agencies. It's Chicago style patronage at the national level. |
| Posted by: Besoeker in Duitsland 2009-10-05 08:21 |
| #2 Oh, and those who say the insurance companies are inhumane - even inhuman - are right. But I expect the far more massive government replacement will be a lot more inhumane and inhuman. NOTHING that big can work well. Especially monopolies. Including government monopolies. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-10-05 07:56 |
| #1 The national economy cannot provide top quality health care to everyone unless costs per unit care come down. It won't even be able to provide the current quality to the currently insured for long - aging baby boom is going to increase demand. I have seen little in the proposed Dem plans that addresses the real problem (unit cost) honestly. Rather, it looks like a way to ration care by bureaucracy (rather than the current method of rationing by ability to pay.) It will make health care more uniform, but poorer overall. And it will stifle advancements. The two proposals I have seen from outside the Dem plans that actually might address unit costs (tort reform and supply expansion) have been dismissed immediately. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-10-05 07:52 |