"

Obama takes biggest domestic gamble to force though health reforms

For more than a year President Obama hoped that he could pull off the coup of comprehensive health reform by leaving the details to Congress. Yesterday he admitted that strategy had failed by unveiling a new one: a ten-page, $950 billion (£614 billion) “President’s Plan” that could make or break his credentials as a progressive leader in the mould of Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson.

The plan amounts to a last-ditch push for healthcare reform, which conservatives all but torpedoed last year and which Republicans condemned again yesterday as a recipe for a “massive government takeover” of an industry that accounts for more than 17 per cent of the US economy.

Mr Obama claimed that his proposals would help 31 million poorer Americans to afford private insurance, outlaw such practices as denying cover to those with pre-existing conditions, and save US taxpayers $100 billion over the next ten years.

Such arguments have failed to sway independent voters or a single congressional Republican over the past year, and they showed little sign of ending the impasse yesterday. They were posted on the White House website as an “opening bid”, aides said, three days before a crucial healthcare summit convened by Mr Obama at which he has promised to show a new spirit of bipartisanship after losing his 60-vote supermajority in the Senate.

The proposals were swiftly condemned by John Boehner, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, as a resurrection of a Bill that the American people had already rejected. “The President has crippled the credibility of this week’s summit,” Mr Boehner said.

In a Washington that has become fascinated by its own paralysis, the only glimmer of bipartisanship yesterday came from California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the husband of a powerful lifelong liberal, met privately with Mr Obama after insisting that substantial health reforms were possible if the Administration could only find a “sweet spot” of common ground with its critics.

In his search for such a sweet spot, Mr Obama has taken as his blueprint a healthcare Bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve and has set out to appease its critics with carefully targeted adjustments. Under his proposals, a tax on the most expensive insurance policies would not take effect until 2018 and then only above a raised threshold. He has abandoned any hope of a so-called public option, scrapped a hugely controversial subsidy for the state of Nebraska and wooed liberals by eliminating an amendment that would have barred abortion payments for anyone with subsidised insurance.

Share prices for the country’s biggest health insurers were broadly buoyant yesterday, suggesting that Wall Street had either factored the President’s widely leaked plans into its calculations in advance, or that it does not believe they will amount to much.

The markets may yet be in for a surprise, but only if Mr Obama can persuade moderate Democrats worried about their re-election prospects later this year to back him. He was helped last Friday by sudden increases of up to 39 per cent in the cost of some Californian health insurance premiums.

A new Newsweek poll suggests that more Americans support the proposals when they read them in detail than when asked to consider them as a whole. Congress is less easily persuaded. Since Scott Brown’s capture of Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat for the Republicans, the Administration’s hopes of passing health reforms with a full 60-seat majority have vanished.

The White House will almost certainly have to add the entire Bill to the budget instead, where it will need only 51 Senate votes to pass. The process will enrage Republicans but it could just lift Mr Obama into the pantheon of great Democratic reformers.

“The President expects an up or down vote on health reform,” one of his spokesmen said, “and he believes the American people deserve one.”

"

Source link