WASHINGTON — With a key element of the health care overhaul now dead, President Barack Obama stepped in Tuesday to push Democratic senators toward final approval of a weakened reform bill, telling them they could not pass up a historic opportunity.
Meeting with the 60 members of the Democratic Senate caucus for 90 minutes, Obama tried to rally the lawmakers’ spirits after a contentious week of turnabouts and disappointments.
He told them the bill still achieves the White House’s main goals and suggested that failure now would put reform out of reach for years, perhaps decades.
“I think any fair reading of this bill will indicate that all the criteria that I laid out when I met before a joint session have now been met,” Obama said in summing up the meeting to reporters afterward.
“It covers 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance, and it has extraordinary insurance reforms in there that make sure that we’re preventing abuse,” he said.
By scrapping both the Medicare buy-in and the public option — a government-run insurance program — Senate leaders are optimistic they can reach 60 votes, although at the cost of a key mechanism to hold down the cost of private-insurance premiums.
Those moves seemed to be enough to win the critical vote of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., but Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., remained publicly uncommitted to the revised legislation.
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., called the White House meeting “powerful” and said it included an address by Lieberman, who on Sunday announced he would filibuster any bill containing either the public-insurance option or a compromise deal that would let those over 55 buy into Medicare.
Because of the Democrats’ razor-thin vote margin, Lieberman’s move single-handedly killed both proposals, and he explained his actions to infuriated colleagues during the meeting, Udall said.
“He said he wanted to let people know he understood their disappointment and even their anger. . . . I don’t know whether he used the ‘a’ word — apologize,” Udall said.
As long as any government plan or Medicare expansion stays out of the bill, “then I’m going to be in a position where I can say what I’ve wanted to say all along: that I’m ready to vote for health care reform,” Lieberman later told reporters.
Dean wants bill killed
Several Democrats told The Associated Press that in the private session, liberals lamented the absence of a government-run insurance option. “There was frustration and angst” expressed, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
Rockefeller said Obama emphasized the historic nature of the legislation, adding: “It’s hard to ignore that.”
Still, some influential liberals are now abandoning the bill.
Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and a medical doctor, said the failure of the compromise deal meant “essentially the collapse of health care reform” and called for killing the bill altogether.
Obama, in both the meeting with lawmakers and in the press conference afterward, methodically ticked off what the bill accomplishes, including the fact that it is deficit-neutral, covers nearly 30 million uninsured and prevents insurance companies from excluding pre-existing conditions.
Overall, the president exhorted the senators to view the glass as half full rather than half empty, participants said.
“The general spirit in the room was that there is enough in this bill that moves us away from the current state of affairs in a way that improves things for families across the United States, that it would be a shame not to pass it,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.
If the Senate does pass a bill, Obama’s intervention is likely to be seen as a key turning point.
Analysts say Obama is essentially attempting to reframe the debate for both lawmakers and the public more generally, at once recasting the bill as a starting point to a longer process and underlining the high risks of failure.
Udall said the president evoked the memory of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to underscore those points.
“He said, ‘I have to tell you, we all knew Teddy Kennedy — he was a master legislator — and he would have pointed out that Social Security first only covered widows and orphans, and now look at the safety net that it provides.’ “
Obama “made the point that if we don’t seize this moment, it will be another decade before we have another opportunity to reform the health care system,” Udall said.
More affordability
The two Republicans seen as most likely to vote with Democrats — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine — also have not committed to the bill. They are looking for greater efforts to boost affordability of insurance premiums for lower-income Americans and added help for small businesses, according to .
A final hurdle is an updated score of the bill’s cost by the Congressional Budget Office, expected sometime this week.
If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., can line up the commitment of 60 lawmakers by Thursday, a final vote could still occur before Christmas, Senate aides say, setting the stage for reconciliation with the House version of the bill in January.
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com
About the measure
What’s in?
At its core, the Senate health care reform legislation is designed to spread coverage to 30 million Americans who now lack it; impose new consumer-friendly regulations on the insurance industry; and slow the rate of growth in health care spending nationally.
It would:
• Require most Americans to purchase insurance.
• Prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
• Establish a new series of “exchanges” through which consumers could shop for policies.
• Provide hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to defray the cost of insurance for families with incomes up to about $88,200 a year for a family of four.
• Provide additional assistance to small businesses to help them afford coverage for their workers.
Who’s holding out?
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., is the only known potential holdout among the 60-member Democratic caucus, a group that includes Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Nelson has been seeking changes to increase restrictions on abortion coverage in a new insurance marketplace the bill would establish.
Compiled from Associated Press reports
