Healthcare Summit Analysis: Democrats to Forge Ahead on Healthcare With or Without Republicans
At the bipartisan health care summit yesterday, President Obama and Democratic Congressional leadership sat down with their adversaries across the aisle in a largely unsuccessful attempt to bridge major gaps in the road to healthcare reform.
In general, Republicans repeated over and over again that only an incremental approach to healthcare reform was acceptable to them, and alluded to poor poll showings of Democratic healthcare reform initiatives.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) criticized the size of the Democratic proposals, arguing that a 2,700-page bill would be bound to contain a lot of surprises. “It will cut Medicare by about half a trillion dollars, and spend most of that on new programs, not on Medicare and making it stronger, even though it’s going broke in 2015. There will be about a half trillion dollars of new taxes in it.”
Democrats hit back, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) saying “we have bent over backwards the last year and a half to get Republican ideas, amendments, suggestions and now have held this summit today…I think the ball is in the Republican’s court.” He went on to say that incremental reform was unacceptable, that incremental reforms had been tried before unsuccessfully.
The most telling remarks came from President Obama himself, however, who indicated that efforts to pass comprehensive health care reform would continue in spite of Republican opposition. He closed the summit saying,
“I’d like Republicans to do a little soul searching to find out if there are some things that you’d be willling to embrace that get to this core problem of 30 million people without health insurance, and dealing seriously with the pre-existing conditions issue. I don’t know frankly whether we can close that gap.
And if we can’t close that gap, then I suspect Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to have a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress about moving forward.”
Posted by 