President Obama is touting the latest version of health care reform as a measure that should draw bipartisan support — and in a way, it does. Both sides hate it.
In the windup to final consideration of reform, the White House is honing its message, characterizing the plan as a modest effort that strikes a political balance whose passage is a foregone conclusion.
“I think whoever sits here this time next week, you all will be talking about health care reform not as a presidential proposal but as something that will soon be the law of the land,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told “Fox News Sunday.”
The administration has picked up no Republican support for the bill, and liberal groups remain unhappy at the lack of a government-run insurance program and other features. But the most important sell this week are a handful of House Democrats Obama still has to convince.
“They are strongly pushing this as a done deal, and it’s partly for their own members,” said John Fortier, a political scholar at the free-market American Enterprise Institute. “They are trying to build confidence, to build momentum, and part of that whole strategy is saying this is going to happen.”
To close the distance, Obama has been repeating a message that his reform plan “is somewhere in the middle,” politically.
In Cleveland, Obama said his plan “essentially” does three things: It ends insurance company practices such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, creates market choices and makes insurance more affordable.
Not mentioned: Federal government regulation of the industry, mandates to obtain coverage or face a tax penalty, new taxes on investments for upper income taxpayers and a tax on high-value benefits plans, among other things.
“I still don’t know if they can pass this monstrosity of a bill,” said Jane Hamsher, founder of the liberal FireDogLake blog.
In addition to losing the public option, Hamsher and others are angered by deals between the administration and drug makers, reportedly reaffirmed in White House strategy sessions over the weekend, that will hamper imports of cheaper pharmaceuticals into the United States, among other things.
Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, said Americans want health care reform, but not a “trillion dollar effort to change health care as we know it for every man, woman and child in America.”
Dennis Simon, a Southern Methodist University political scientist, said the White House is pushing hard because Obama “seriously needs to win this.”
But the message coming from the White House is that this final push for the bill transcends politics.
“As we get closer to the vote, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on,” Obama said. “We hear a lot of people in Washington talking about politics, talking about what this means in November, talking about the poll numbers for Democrats and Republicans.”
