NY Times: Obama Aides Aim to Scale Back Health Bills
Richard Moore
Timed to coincide with Congress’s return from its summer recess, the president’s address would follow a tumultuous month in which opponents of sweeping health legislation disrupted lawmakers’ town-hall-style meetings and the White House struggled to regain control of the debate.
The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said: “House Republicans want to hear what the president has to say, but after the public outcry this August, it’s clear the American people don’t want a new speech. They want a new plan.”
Obama Aides Aim to Simplify and Scale Back Health Bills
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements.
Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.
But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Mr. Obama would be “more prescriptive than he has been to date.” And he added, “We have a tremendous amount of consensus in Congress to build off of.”
In his address, Mr. Obama is expected to emphasize areas of potential agreement. One is the need for federal regulation of health insurance companies to prohibit them from denying coverage, or charging higher premiums, because of a person’s medical history or current condition. Another is the need for federal subsidies to make insurance affordable to millions of lower-income people.
By signaling that they would seek to revise existing versions of legislation moving through the House and Senate, administration officials and Democratic leaders in Congress — many of whom had said earlier in the summer that they saw no need to scale back their ambitions — made clear that their political calculations had changed. With Congressional Republicans standing almost unanimously in opposition to the Democratic approach, the target now for Mr. Obama is primarily a handful of moderate Democrats and the one Republican who seems open to a deal, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.
“It’s so important to get a deal,” a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy. “He will do almost anything it takes to get one.”
In scheduling a prime-time speech for next Wednesday before members of the House and Senate and a national television audience, Mr. Obama chose to put his political standing on the line more directly and dramatically than he has so far on health care, his signature domestic initiative.
He will deliver the address 16 years after President Bill Clinton outlined his plan for universal insurance coverage in a speech to Congress on Sept. 22, 1993. A year later, in September 1994, the legislation was declared dead, after withering attacks by Republicans and insurance companies. Some Obama advisers, wary of parallels between that effort and Mr. Obama’s push for an overhaul of the health system, had argued that the president should give a televised speech from the Oval Office instead of the House chamber.
Timed to coincide with Congress’s return from its summer recess, the president’s address would follow a tumultuous month in which opponents of sweeping health legislation disrupted lawmakers’ town-hall-style meetings and the White House struggled to regain control of the debate. Mr. Obama is also scheduled to travel to Cincinnati on Monday to speak at a large Labor Day picnic organized by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. He will have a receptive audience, as labor unions have been among the strongest supporters of his effort to expand coverage and rein in health costs.
So far, the administration’s ideas of concessions are likely to fall far short of the fundamental changes that Congressional Republicans seek.
For now, White House officials said, Mr. Obama remains committed to the goal of insuring all Americans and still prefers to foster competition for insurance companies by creating a new government insurance program, or public option.
White House officials are combing the versions of health care legislation approved by four of the five Congressional committees with jurisdiction on the issue, both to find common ground and to jettison provisions — some relatively minor — that have drawn fire from critics on the political right.
To avoid some of the most heated criticism voiced in recent weeks, White House officials said they would have no objection if Congress scrapped proposals to have Medicarepay for counseling on end-of-life care.
Critics said such counseling could lead to pressure on patients to forgo expensive treatments for terminal illnesses. Mr. Obama has said it is ludicrous to suggest that “we want to set up death panels to pull the plug on Grandma.”
White House officials said Congress could also drop proposals requiring the government to create school-based health clinics and collect nationwide data on health and health care by race, sex, sexual orientation and “gender identity.”
Supporters of the House bill said such data would help reduce “health disparities,” but critics said they feared the government could assemble a database that posed a threat to personal privacy.
If Mr. Obama does not gain traction by making these concessions, his allies on Capitol Hill said, they may have to consider bigger changes. For example, they said, rather than requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, Congress might start by requiring coverage of children, or families with children.
While such a change would deeply disappoint many of Mr. Obama’s supporters, it could have two potential political benefits, reducing the initial cost of any bill and reducing the size of cuts needed in the future growth of Medicare.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, welcomed Mr. Obama’s plan for an address to Congress.
“This level of involvement from the president could well be a game-changer,” Mr. Schumer said. “There is no better way to turn public opinion around than to have someone as popular as President Obama addressing the American people directly, without intermediaries interpreting, or misinterpreting, his ideas.”
Republicans’ reactions showed that they had become emboldened in their opposition since Congress last met.
The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said: “House Republicans want to hear what the president has to say, but after the public outcry this August, it’s clear the American people don’t want a new speech. They want a new plan.”
Mr. Boehner said the Democrats should scrap their current proposals and start over.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.