Looming Deadlines For Healthcare Force Obama To Call In Backup

Jul 13, 2009 3 Comments ›› Erik Wong

WASHINGTON — The White House summoned two lawmakers critical to President Barack Obama’s hopes for health care overhaul to a private meeting Monday as the timetable for a comprehensive bill continued to slip.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., were to meet at the White House on Monday afternoon, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Baucus and Rangel are in charge of the crucial job of coming up with how to pay for a comprehensive health care overhaul that would cost an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years, mostly for subsidies to help cover some 50 million uninsured Americans.

The meeting comes as Obama, newly returned from an overseas trip, must refocus on his top legislative priority: a sweeping health care bill to bring down costs and cover the uninsured. Timelines for the health legislation continue to be pushed back, with a bill unveiling promised for Monday in the House sliding to Tuesday as House Democratic leaders struggled to regain support from moderate and conservative Democrats who threatened opposition last week over the bill’s price tag and other issues.

The White House’s strategy to leave the legislative back-and-forth to Congress has produced varying and sometimes contradictory versions of health care legislation — along with delays. As the Senate turns its attention to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, the focus on that side of the Capitol will turn away from Obama’s top domestic priority.

The administration’s Democratic allies in Congress hinted they would not deliver legislation before leaving town for an August recess. The delay would be a blow to the White House and to Democrats’ electoral prospects.

The House and Senate are working toward legislation that would deliver on Obama’s popular goals from his presidential campaign, but they are hardly in unison. House Democrats have proposed raising taxes on wealthy Americans to pay for the plan.

That idea appears to face opposition in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators is trying to reassemble a financing package now missing a key component: an unpopular tax on high-cost health insurance benefits, which would have raised $320 billion out of a $1 trillion package.

A bipartisan deal would have a better chance of winning broad support. That’s what Obama says he wants, and the best chance for such a deal is still in the Senate.

But after a turbulent week, senators will move cautiously. A lot more work is needed to avoid another round of miscalculations.

Republicans, seizing on an issue that affects all Americans and has shown a glimmer of hope for an out-of-power political party, have lambasted the proposals as rash and irresponsible. They also see the issue as a way to win House and Senate seats in the 2010 midterm elections.

“There is no chance that it’s going to be done by August,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. “President Obama was right about one thing: He said if it’s not done quickly, it won’t be done at all. Why did he say that? Because the longer it hangs out there, the more the American people are skeptical, anxious and even in opposition to it.”

Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, tried to calm fears Democrats would tax some employer-provided health care benefits as income. She said the details are far from finished.

“Well, the House has a version,” she said, discounting any version as final. “There are a couple of different proposals being worked on in the Senate.”

Sebelius spoke with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday and Kyl appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”

(AP)