Obama Signals That He's Not Going To Get Behind Making Health Care Bill Better

Last night President Obama sat down with congressional Democrats and gave them the bad news: despite cutting the GOP obstructionists out of the process entirely, the health care reform bill isn't going to get any better in the home stretch. In a meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Whip Durbin (the last 2 by phone), Obama-- who has kinda/sorta stayed out of the nitty gritty of the legislation so far-- made it clear that he's in charge from now on. That isn't good news for anyone who thought they were voting for Hope and Change when they pulled the lever for Obama last November.

For one, he's going with the regressive financing the Senate picked-- taxing the misnamed "Cadillac plans"-- instead of with the House's plan to tax the multimillionaires who made out like bandits during the Bush years. He seems more interested that a bill pass before his State of the Union address than making the bill more useful for the hard-pressed Americans who elected him. The Beltway Stenography Service adds "Obama also responded to Pelosi’s strong, repeated pitches for the public option by making it clear that, while he supports the proposal, he doesn’t think it is doable... The markers Obama laid down-- doubts about the public option and a call for a Cadillac tax-- indicate that the president is favoring the Senate’s more conservative approach, which is not surprising considering the political realities. Passing reform is now a numbers game-- 60 and 218. Pelosi has votes to spare. Reid does not."

I spoke with Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) on the phone the other day and she felt the best deal progressives could get this year-- "we'll be doing health care reform next year and the following year and after that," she predicted-- would be better affordability (i.e., more generous subsidies). Pelosi, who seems a little disgruntled with Obama, is still telling House members she can make the bill better in the ping-pong tournament the process has now become.

But it remains unclear how much leverage the House will have in negotiations given that Senate Democrats cannot spare a single vote without jeopardizing the bill’s chances. The White House will also have a big role in the final product.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, met Tuesday with her top lieutenants and the three committee chairmen directly responsible for the health care bill, as they prepared for negotiations to begin in earnest this week... After the meeting at the Capitol, House Democrats said they would push the Senate to provide more generous subsidies to help moderate-income Americans buy insurance, but expressed willingness to drop the idea of a government-run health plan.
The House bill includes a government-run health insurance plan, or public option, to compete with private insurers. The public option was dropped from the Senate bill after centrist Democrats said they would oppose any measure that included it.

House Democrats said they could live without the public option provided that they had sufficient guarantees that other steps would be taken to increase options for consumers and to tighten the clamp on any abuses by private insurance companies.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the House leadership, said some of his colleagues would press to end the insurance industry’s exemption from federal antitrust laws, a step strongly opposed by [former Insurance Industry exec and complete shill for the industry] Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who has said he would oppose the bill if the House made any changes that he did not like.