White House hopeful on health reform

Financial Times:

The White House on Wednesday sought to quell suggestions it was preparing to pull the plug on further negotiations with Republicans over healthcare reform even though most are bitterly opposed to any Democratic-inspired change.

Senior administration officials pointed to the continuing bipartisan talks in the Senate led by Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the finance committee, which includes three Republican senators – Chuck Grassley, Olympia Snowe and Mike Enzi.

It followed a report in Wednesday’s New York Times in which Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, said the Republican leadership had made a strategic decision to try to defeat the proposed $1,000bn 10-year overhaul of healthcare. But Obama officials said they were still hopeful some Republicans would support the final product.

“I think the president would orbit the moon if he thought it would help,” Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s spokesman, said on Wednesday. “There are certainly Republicans on the finance committee and others that we believe are still working in a constructive way to get reform through the Senate and ultimately to the president’s desk . . . I don’t know why we’d short-circuit any of that now.”

Mr Grassley, who leads the Republican side of the negotiations in the Senate, said on Wednesday he would continue to pursue a bipartisan bill. Mr Baucus, his counterpart, has set a deadline of September 15 for the bipartisan group to come up with a compromise bill.

“I’ve said all year that something as big and important as healthcare legislation should have broad-based support,” said Mr Grassley in a statement on Wednesday. “So far, no one has developed that kind of support, either in Congress or at the White House. That doesn’t mean we should quit. It means we should keep working until we can put something together.”

Wednesday’s comments follow growing concern among liberal Democrats that the White House is preparing to junk the public insurance option, which Republicans and moderate Democrats see as the thin end of the wedge of socialised medicine. On Monday 60 Democratic lawmakers said they would vote against any bill that excluded the public option. That leaves the White House in an increasingly awkward place between the rock of near unanimous Republican disdain for reform and the hard place of liberal insistence that reform include a basic public option.

On Wednesday, however, officials insisted there were still many weeks to go before number counting began on Capitol Hill.

Until recently it was assumed that were Mr Obama to fail to win bipartisan support for healthcare reform, he would fall back on a purely partisan bill. But the deepening split between liberal and conservative Democrats makes that plan look impractical.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols