Recordpub.com - Obama demands health care vote

By Alan Fram

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama urged Congress Wednesday to vote “up or down” on sweeping health care legislation in the next few weeks, endorsing a plan that denies Senate Republicans the right to kill the bill by stalling with a filibuster.

“I don’t see how another year of negotiations would help. Moreover, the insurance companies aren’t starting over,” Obama said, rejecting Republican calls to begin anew on an effort to remake the health care system.

The president made his appeal as Democratic leaders in Congress surveyed their rank and file for the votes needed to pass legislation by majority vote — invoking rules that deny Senate Republicans the right to block it through endless stalling debate. Obama specifically endorsed that approach.

The outcome will affect nearly every American, either making major changes in the ways they receive and pay for health care or leaving current systems in place. There is still no certainty about the final result in Congress — or even that Democrats will agree to the series of changes that Obama said he was including as Republican contributions.

GOP leaders were unmoved.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said a decision by Democrats to invoke rules that bar filibusters would be “met with outrage” by the public, and he said Obama was pushing a sweeping bill that voters don’t want.

“They’ve had enough of this yearlong effort to get a win for the Democratic Party at any price to the American people,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

At its core, Obama’s proposal would extend health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans while cracking down on insurance company practices such as denying coverage on the basis of a pre-existing medical condition.

With his remarks, delivered at the White House, Obama took the lead in a bid by congressional Democrats to mount a party-line rescue mission for the health care legislation that appeared on the cusp of passage late last year, only to be derailed when Republicans won a Massachusetts Senate seat that gave them the ability to block it.

Obama’s remarks were replete with criticism of the insurance industry as well as dismissive asides about GOP critics.

Insurers are “continuing to raise premiums and deny coverage. For us to start over now could simply lead to delay that could last for another decade or more,” he said.

As for calls for additional debate, he said that in the year since he inaugurated his campaign for health care changes, “every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made.”

“Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everyone has said it,” Obama said as murmurs of laughter swept through his receptive audience of invited guests in the White House East Room.

The president’s appearance appeared part of an endgame strategy put in motion last week, when Obama presided over a bipartisan summit meeting with leaders of both parties and both houses. After seven hours of discussion, he said he had heard ideas for changes from sides, and he signaled that the time may have come for Democrats to proceed on their own if GOP critics were not ready to join them.

While his spokesmen and Democratic congressional leaders joined in calls for an up-or-down vote — a simple majority, no filibusters allowed — the White House announced with fanfare on Tuesday he was asking lawmakers to incorporate four GOP suggestions.

Obama said he was exploring GOP proposals for cracking down on fraudulent medical charges, revamping ways to resolve malpractice disputes, boosting doctors’ Medicaid reimbursements and offering tax incentives to curb unnecessary patient visits to doctors.

The ideas included an experiment that would establish special courts in which judges with medical expertise would decide malpractice allegations. The idea has been criticized by the Center for Justice & Democracy, a consumer group that prefers the current system of awarding damages. It said health courts would be “anti-patient.”

In a speech that reprised many of the points he has made in the past year, Obama cast the battle over health care as something more.

“At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know it is still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act.”

“They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership.”

Immediately after Obama finished speaking, the White House made good on his promise to “do everything in my power to make the case for reform,” saying he would travel to Pennsylvania on Monday and to Missouri next Wednesday to press the issue.

24.	Posted by DoWhatsRight March 4, 2010
	SweetDee Good post you are at least addressed the subject, and not the other posters. However, you did look at the bill with the concept that it will make it so I will not go broke paying if I or someone in my family gets sick. That is you think what the health care bill will do for me. Under this bill you may well go broke paying the premiums without getting sick. Then you say because it does not affect me personally. Doesn't mean I should not support it. What if it cost you your job, or a family, or a friend their job? It would not affect you personally. Would you still support it? There is a cost to business based on the size of the payroll and the number of employees. Business will reduce the payroll in order to cut the taxes. Would you support that? There is a monthly fee attached to the premium to pay for abortion. Would you support that? So you see, no matter how you look at it, it still comes down to what will the bill do for me? (Perhaps I should also have included, "to me.) As for no one expecting to get the insurance free, there most certainly are a number of people that expect it. In fact, to be sure everyone is insured the taxpayer may have to pay for those that have no jobs and no income other than family assistance. These are usually the people that need the insurance the most. Read the bill and you will see this is not the Health Care reform we need. It creates more cost and problems than it solves

18.	Posted by Uknown March 4, 2010
	You can listen to "Fair Tax" or you can read this: A Milestone in the Health Care Journey by Ron Brownstein When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot. "I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing." Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end." To read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/11/a-milestone-in-the-health-care-journey/30619/