President Barack Obama was to pay a rare visit to the US Congress Thursday to give his Democrats an election-year pep talk as lawmakers worked their way towards an elusive health-care overhaul.
Obama was to address House Democrats at their annual “issues conference” one day after marathon talks with top lawmakers failed to yield a breakthrough deal resolving the intra-party disputes that have held up the historic bill.
The president’s visit came as polls showed the US public was skeptical of his push to remake health care, his top domestic priority, with a large segment of the US public disappointed that the sweeping legislation does not go far enough.
Obama was also due to highlight Democratic efforts to bring down double-digit unemployment, a major vulnerability as the party heads into November mid-term elections that historically see the sitting president’s party lose seats.
Democrats have pushed for a new “jobs bill” to steady the sputtering US economy and blunt Republican charges that the “job-killing” president has made the recession he inherited from former president George W. Bush worse.
Republicans have also shown renewed confidence that they can peel off just enough Democrats to defeat the health care plan, which cleared the Senate and House of Representatives by the narrowest of margins late last year.
On Wednesday, top Democratic leaders huddled with Obama at the White House for hours to try to map a way to meld those rival plans into a compromise they could pass before Obama’s annual State of the Union speech, just weeks away.
But the senior lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, ended their discussions without announcing a breakthrough that would hand Democrats a major political victory.
“Today we made significant progress in bridging the remaining gaps between the two health insurance reform bills,” a joint statement from the three said. Going into the talks, disputes ranged from how to pay for the expansion of coverage to tens of millions more Americans and whether to create national or state-by-state “exchanges” where consumers could assess competing health coverage plans before buying.
Some major labor unions — staunch Democratic allies with a critical role to play ahead of the November mid-term elections — have warned against the Senate bill’s call for an excise tax on generous health care packages, a provision that would likely affect their members.
Democrats have virtually no margin for error: their plan squeaked through the Senate with exactly the 60 votes needed, and cleared the House with 220 votes, just two more than the bare minimum needed.
Obama promised Saturday that Americans will see the effects of health reform this year, saying Congress is “on the verge” of approving a compromise bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
The House and Senate measures aim to extend coverage to more than 30 million out of the 36 million Americans that lack it, end abusive health insurance company practices, and curb soaring costs that take giant bites out of family and government budgets.
The United States is the world’s richest nation but the only industrialized democracy that does not provide health care coverage to all of its citizens.
As a nation, the United States spends more than double what Britain, France and Germany do per person on health care.
But it lags behind other countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
