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No High Hopes For Health Care Summit
Immediately after President Barack Obama announced a bipartisan health reform summit, Democrats and Republicans made clear they have almost no expectation the half-day meeting can break a bitter yearlong standoff.
The two parties are staking out positions that leave them completely at odds even before they sit down.
Republicans say they’re open to compromise — as long as Obama tears up the House and Senate bills, restarts the legislative process and drops several key parts of his wish list.
Democrats say, not a chance.
And in fact, Obama hopes to walk into the Feb. 25 summit with an agreement in hand between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on a final Democratic bill, so they can move ahead with a reform package after the sit-down.
House Republican leaders delivered a letter to the White House Monday that included a list of pointed questions that they would like answered before the meeting at Blair House, such as whether Obama would give up on using reconciliation, a way to pass health reform in the Senate with just 51 votes.
“If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate,” the letter read.
So what’s the point? A jaded Washington wondered how a single meeting — in front of live TV cameras, no less — could change the fundamentals of the debate.
Many concluded it won’t.
“Good luck with that,” said New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, playing the role of Democratic skeptic to the president’s proposal. “The GOP has been the ‘party of no’ all year. Republicans have made a tactical decision not to cooperate, and they’ve even called health care reform Obama’s Waterloo.”
Republicans and Democrats said it was too soon to lay out their plans for the meeting. But already, their respective strategies seemed to be taking shape, with both sides gearing up to use the summit as yet another forum for political point-scoring.
For Obama, it fits neatly into his post-Massachusetts strategy of painting the GOP as do-nothing obstructionists. The Republicans have spent the year almost uniformly opposing Obama’s agenda — and being rewarded by voters for doing it.
Now Obama wants to use the meeting to call them out in public, to question whether they have any plans to fix the nation’s health care system and any willingness to help him do it. The White House is eager to draw a sharper contrast with Republicans in the months leading up to the 2010 election, and clearly sees the meeting as a good start.
The summit also gives Democratic congressional leaders a new deadline to reach an agreement on their bill, which has been stalled since the Massachusetts Senate special election.
But more than that, Democrats hope the summit could provide them political cover to go it alone on a party-line vote if Republicans say they won’t provide any votes for an Obama-style health fix.
“The president wants to show his openness one last time before Congress completes their work on the bill,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA and a veteran health care reform advocate.
And for Republicans, who learned of the summit only an hour before Obama announced it during a pre-Super Bowl interview on CBS Sunday, they plan to call on the president to scrap a politically unpopular bill and break it into parts, arguing that Americans have rejected the go-big approach to health care reform.
Congressional Republicans moved quickly Monday to frame their next debate with Obama after their last back and forth with the president — a seemingly impromptu, nationally televised town hall at the House Republicans’ retreat late last month in Baltimore from which Obama came away with some much-needed momentum.
In the letter Monday to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia said that Republicans have been asking the president for a meeting to talk health care since May, with no success.
The two GOP leaders questioned whether Obama would open up the meeting to dissenting views and state officials who are resisting national reform. They also want to include discussion of a government report that shows the Democrats' current plan wouldn't lower costs for most Americans - and may make health care more expensive.
In response, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs issued a statement that made clear Obama isn’t abandoning the current legislation.
“He’s been very clear about his support for the House and Senate bills,” Gibbs said. “The President looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process, and as recently as the State of the Union Address. He’s open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny.”
Still, it’s hard to see where the parties can find common ground, if the Democratic bills are the starting point.
Republicans have fundamental objections to the main pillars of Democratic health reform, including cuts to Medicare, tax increases on wealthy individuals and the health care industry and a mandate on individuals to buy insurance.
Even Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, a moderate who was the only Republican to vote for the bill in the Finance Committee, has said Democrats need to start over.
But Stuart Butler, vice president of domestic and economic policy research at the Heritage Foundation, said Republicans need to do more than that — and put Obama on the defensive.
“It is politically dangerous for Republicans,” Butler said. “They have got to come forward with a very clear vision of what they want to do and why what the president is doing now is not acceptable to the American people.”
Republicans should commit to working with Democrats on incremental reform if Obama agrees to start over, he said.
“That puts the hot potato back in the president’s lap,” Butler said.
Butler sees potential for agreement in several areas. The Democratic bills include ideas championed for years by Republicans, but often not to the degree that the GOP would like.
Obama supports lifting the tax exemption on employer health benefits, as do Republicans, who would return the money to uninsured Americans through tax credits to purchase insurance.
Republicans also want to empower states to do more on health care, which is a provision included in the Senate bill.
And Obama last year said he was open to looking at ideas to curb medical malpractice lawsuits – a key Republican goal. But Republicans aides say that even if Obama endorsed a tort reform component, that alone wouldn’t be enough to win GOP support for the Democratic plan.
“The only constructive discussions will start with a blank sheet of paper,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a doctor and the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee who sparred with Obama in Baltimore. “Enacting positive health care reform still remains possible, but it will require the president to accept that his plan is a nonstarter with the American people.”
Republicans would like Obama to embrace the House leadership plan, which would lower premiums for people who already have insurance, but does little to expand coverage for those who don't.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a moderate who was one of the last holdouts on the bill, said she welcomed the president’s bipartisan gesture, but warned that Democrats should go only so far in accommodating Republicans.
“This meeting should not be an excuse to start over,” Landrieu said. “It should help us pave a road to the finish line.”
Sources: Politico, MSNBC, Youtube
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