President Barack Obama is convening a bipartisan health care summit today at Blair House that many see as the administration’s last chance to drum up the necessary support to pass comprehensive health care reform, the White House’s top domestic priority.
Although the meeting has been billed as a bipartisan summit providing both sides with a chance to hash out the key issues of the proposed bill, the die has been cast in the health care debate for some time. Both sides have drawn their battle lines and have become entrenched in ideological warfare.
Republicans have uniformly opposed health care reform since the idea was introduced, with Sen. Jim DeMint famously declaring that they would make the debate President Osama’s “Waterloo.”
Since that time, each chamber of Congress has passed a version of health care reform, with nearly half a dozen separate measures in individual committees and hundreds of amendments to each of those bills. Through it all, Democratic proposals have garnered just one Republican vote.
Given Republican opposition to the bill, many believe that the summit is simply grand political theater, designed to provide the debate with a veneer of bipartisanship and cooperation, and allowing the president to wield his enormous influence though the bully pulpit.
The appearance of the six-hour meeting may provide Democrats with breathing room to pass the bill through reconciliation in the Senate, a somewhat controversial procedural maneuver that would allow the bill to be passed with a simple 51-vote majority. The White House may be hoping that the American public comes away from the meeting with the view that Republicans are simply not offering any constructive ideas and are simply opposing the bill out of political calculations, laying the groundwork for the up-and-down vote.
Others believe that the main audience for the summit is Democratic lawmakers hesitant to vote on the bill for fear of voter backlash. Republican Scott Brown’s victory in liberal Massachusetts gave many Democrats pause heading into November‘s midterm election, leading many lawmakers to ask the president to either scale back or scrap his plans for health care reform.
The discussions will focus on four areas that the White House claims it hopes Democrats and Republicans can come to terms on: controlling costs, insurance reforms, expansion of coverage and deficit reduction.
“We all know this is urgent,” President Obama said in his opening remarks. “And unfortunately over the course of the year, despite all the hearings that took place and all the negotiations that took place and people on both sides of the aisle worked long and hard on this issue and -- this became a very ideological battle. It became a very partisan battle. And politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense.
“I don't know that those gaps can be bridged. And it may be that at the end of the day we come out of here and everybody says, well, you know, we have some honest disagreements; people are sincere in wanting to help, but they've got different ideas about how to do it, and we can't bridge the gap between Democrats and Republicans on this.”