President Barack Obama and his top Democratic congressional allies worked Wednesday to overcome obstacles to enacting a historic overhaul of US health care, his top domestic goal.
Obama welcomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the White House as intra-party feuds clouded efforts to forge a compromise bill from the two chambers’ rival versions.
The president, the leaders, and heads of major congressional committees were to meet after those talks as Democrats strove to pass the measure before his annual State of the Union speech in late January or early February.
Disputes ranged from how to raise funds to pay for the expansion of coverage, to whether to create national or state-by-state “exchanges” where consumers could assess competing health coverage offers 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.
“Work on bridging the final differences is still going on, and there simply isn’t anything final to discuss yet,” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said late Tuesday.
Obama was also to address Democratic lawmakers on Thursday at their annual “issues conference” in a bid to rally support for what would be the most sweeping overhaul of its kind in four decades.
Republicans are united in their opposition to the plan, and polls show the US public is sharply divided over the Democratic effort, though a sizeable chunk of the opposition is from Americans who say it does not go far enough.
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).
