Obama, GOP lock horns on health-care reform

What happened

With several health-care reform bills hitting growing resistance from Congress and the public, President Obama this week threw all his political capital behind his ambitious goal of providing “quality, affordable health care to all Americans,” championing reform in a prime-time news conference, and huddling with recalcitrant Democrats in the Oval Office. Concerns over the cost of reform spiked after the director of the Congressional Budget Office testified last week that the proposals passed out of committees thus far would not reduce health-care costs—and would, in fact, add $239 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years.

Pressure to find new savings and revenue increased after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi retreated from a much-criticized House plan to pay for expanded coverage through a surtax on the top-earning 1.2 percent of households. Under the plan, top earners in some high-tax states, including New York and California, would face top marginal rates above 50 percent. Alternative proposals to make the reform package pay for itself include squeezing savings from Medicare and taxing generous employee health-care packages. The fate of a proposed government-run plan—a “public option”—remained unresolved.

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With a new poll showing the president’s support on health care falling below 50 percent, Republicans sensed weakness. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” said Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. “It will break him.” Obama responded that soaring health-care costs are “breaking America’s economy,” and hurting millions of people. “This isn’t about me,” he said.

What the editorials said

It’s high time Obama got off the sidelines and threw himself into this fight, said The Philadelphia Inquirer. To overcome the “chorus of boos,” Obama must “confront head-on the price and affordability” issues, proving that reform “won’t bust the budget.”

But that’s exactly what current Democratic plans would do, said The Christian Science Monitor. One way to avoid this fate is to establish a blue-ribbon commission to make politically difficult recommendations for reducing federal spending on Medicare, the health-care plan for the elderly that is “by far the largest contributor to the country’s ballooning debt.” Politicians simply aren’t capable of making the hard choices required to bring medical costs under control.

What the columnists said

“Obamacare is at war with itself,” said Robert Reich in Salon.com. In order to blunt opposition to reform, the White House bought off interest groups from Big Pharma and private insurers to doctors by agreeing to protect them from major income reductions. But you can’t pay for universal coverage without major cuts somewhere, and the reality is that Obama will need a surtax on the rich, too.

Finally, we’re seeing Obama sweat, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. Panicked that his polls are sagging, the president is in a rush to “reform” an industry that represents “one-sixth of the economy” before Congress’ August recess. His haste is reckless—but understandable. “The longer Obama’s health-care program marinates in the sun, the worse it smells.”

Doing nothing will stink even worse, said Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post. Health-care costs will continue to rise, so the status quo will “raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance, and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.” So maybe we should take the best deal we can get. The only “perfect” plan “would let everyone have everything they want while getting someone else to pay for it.”

What next?

Democrats have large enough majorities in both houses to pass reform legislation without Republican votes—but first they have to resolve internal divisions. For that reason, Obama was dropping broad hints that he’d no longer insist on an Aug. 7 deadline for the Senate and House to pass reform plans. If the Democrats fail to agree on any health-care plan, it would damage the president and the party in advance of the 2010 election. “That’s why I think we’ll end up with a health-care bill,” said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. “A perfect bill? No. But the distance between a perfect bill and the status quo is so vast that we could have something that’s both a massive historical improvement and a crushing disappointment. That’s what I think we’ll get.”