White House Enters the Health Care Debate

Nearly a year after kicking off the debate over health care reform at a bipartisan White House meeting in March 2009, President Barack Obama last week provided his framework for health care reform.



In a carefully worded, 11-page document, the President made clear what he believes must be included in comprehensive health care reform legislation. The President's proposal would meet the goals and objectives NLC has set forth for health care reform. These include:



• Ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable and appropriate health care coverage;



• Reducing the rate of growth in health care costs;



• Treating cities and towns like any other employer and ensuring that they have access to all of the cost savings and service enhancing mechanisms provided for in health care reform; and



• Allowing cities and towns to continue to enter into state-wide risk pools to ensure that they are able to provide their employees with the most cost effective and appropriate health insurance.



If the President gets his way, Administration officials claim, health insurance would become more affordable, would ensure 31 million Americans who currently have no health insurance are able to obtain coverage, would create a more competitive health insurance market through public marketplaces known as "exchanges" that would give "tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage access to affordable insurance;" would end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, age, race or sex; and would "place the federal budget and the American economy "on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years - and about $1 trillion over the second decade."



As part of his effort to push his health care agenda, the President last week hosted a bipartisan and bicameral health care summit in which House and Senate Democrats were able to discuss their desires for health care reform.



What became clear early in the summit that was there was not going to be a "kumbaya" moment in which Republicans and Democrats would come together in support of a comprehensive health care reform bill. What became clear by the end of the summit was that the parties may have been driven further apart.



Republicans said there was no way they would vote for Obama's bill, and Democrats talked openly about pushing health care through Congress on a simple majority vote by using a controversial parliamentary maneuver known as reconciliation.



President Obama, at the end of the session, criticized Republicans for advocating "baby steps" and rejected their call to start over. Without significant movement and cooperation in the next month the President said he would push ahead without Republicans to pass health care reform, and allow the voters to decide if that was the right thing to do.