In what many have hailed as his last best chance to turn the tide in the health care reform debate, President Barack Obama delivered an inspiring but ineffective speech before a rare joint session of Congress in which he backed the much-maligned public option but did little to address concerns about the cost of reform.
Experts agreed that the President needed to seize this opportunity and take a leadership role in a political debate that has turned partisan and reached a stalemate as the House and Senate are calling for incompatible plans on how best to enact reform. And, while Obama made his support for a public option unequivocal, he failed to threaten a veto if the Senate did not deliver one.
I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.
This was a critical moment of the speech and the moment in which Obama had the opportunity to change the debate on Capitol Hill. To put it bluntly, he failed.
In another key moment of the speech, the President came out aggressively but ultimately failed to address concerns among majorities of Americans that the cost of insuring tens of millions of Americans wouldn’t come out of taxpayer pockets and reiterated his threat to veto any bill that couldn’t pay for itself.
I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.
The biggest problem with this statement is that the President - and Congressional Democrats - continue to potential future savings achieved by cutting waste and fraud out of existing government run health care programs - Medicare and Medicaid - to offset the costs of the public option and tax credits for Americans who cannot afford health insurance. There simply is no tangible evidence that this will happen. Expect this claim to be refuted in the Republican response to the speech. In this respect, the President’s speech did little to change the landscape of the debate.
The President went on the offensive regarding claims that deficit-neutral health care reform will mean raiding the Medicare trust fund that protects our nation’s seniors.
More than four decades ago, this nation stood up for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work, our seniors should not be left to struggle with a pile of medical bills in their later years. That is how Medicare was born. And it remains a sacred trust that must be passed down from one generation to the next. That is why not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan.
Obama also used the speech to address some of the most controversial aspects of the health care reform debate. The President promised that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place” and that ‘death panels’ are not part of his idea of reform. During this portion of the speech, a line assuring reform would not provide insurance for illegal immigrants drew a somewhat less than “Congressional” reply from one member of Congress - “That’s a lie!”
Significantly, the President offered a potential olive branch to Republicans who have fought him on health care reform when he offered to explore the issue of tort reform.
I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs. So I am proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine. I know that the Bush Administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these issues. It’s a good idea, and I am directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to move forward on this initiative today.
It is unlikely that the President’s olive branch on tort reform will serve sufficient to sway any Republican votes or that his invocation of the memory of Ted Kennedy would sway Republican Senators Grassley, McCain and Hatch into supporting a public option when it seems clear to many including Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus that “the public option cannot pass the Senate.”
It is, however, fair to say that the President has been paying close attention to the tone and direction the health care reform debate has taken over the past month. He understands that the American people will not support a plan that adds nearly a trillion dollars to the federal deficit and do not trust bureaucrats with decisions best left to doctors and patients. Despite this, the President remains set on a course of action that appears poised to do exactly that.
President Obama deserves an “A” for effort but failed to deliver in his last best chance to secure a victory on health care reform.
Tags: Barack Obama, cooperatives, John McCain, joint session of Congress, Max Baucus, Orrin Hatch, public-option, Senate Finance Committee, trigger option
