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House passes health care overhaul

Chase Snider — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:34:02 +0000

By Noam N. Levey, Janet Hook, Mark Silva and Michael Muskal
Tribune Washington Bureau
(MCT)
LOS ANGELES AND WASHINGTON — Delivering a hard-fought victory in President Obama’s yearlong pursuit of a national health care overhaul, a divided House narrowly approved legislation Sunday night that could reshape the way Americans deal with wellness and illness.
House Democratic leaders proved they could hold the majority caucus together, passing the Senate version of the health care legislation, 219-212, after weeks of arm-twisting and politicking.
A reconciliation package of amendments was also expected to pass the House on Sunday night. That measure, which will resolve disagreements between the House and Senate bills, will have to go to the Senate under a “budget reconciliation” process. It can be passed by a simple majority and cannot be filibustered.
Led by Obama, Democrats made health care the centerpiece of their domestic agenda in this midterm election year.
Republicans oppose the legislation, arguing it is too expensive and broadens government powers too much. They argue the majority Democrats have rammed the bill through, avoiding GOP policy suggestions.
Democrats accuse the Republicans of refusing to negotiate in order to hand Obama a major political defeat. Democrats also say they have incorporated some Republican suggestions into the final legislation.
The House debate illustrated all points of view.
“I know this bill is complicated, but it’s also very simple,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.. “Illness and infirmity are universal, but we are stronger against them together than we are alone. . . . In that shared strength is our nation’s strength.”
As the outcome of the vote appeared certain, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., told the House: “Perhaps it’s time for Washington to stop talking and start listening. . . . I’m listening to the thousands of citizens who traveled to our nation’s capital this weekend to tell us, in no uncertain terms, they want us to kill this bill.”
Democratic leaders hailed the health care overhaul as historic legislation on par with the enactment of Social Security after the Great Depression and Medicare in the 1960s.
Underscoring that sense of history, House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., brought to the floor and read from a copy of the typed 1939 letter President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent to Congress asking it to make a national health care program part of the Social Security Act.
“This is a historic day, and we are happy warriors,” said Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We will be a part of history, joining Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s passage of Social Security, Lyndon Johnson’s passage of Medicare and now Barack Obama’s passage of health care.”
Republicans didn’t see it that way.
“Some say we’re making history. I say we’re breaking history,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.
“Only in Washington, D.C., could you say you’re going to spend $1 trillion and save the tax payers money,” he said. “This Congress is poised to ignore the will of the majority of the American people. . . . This is the people’s House, and the people don’t want a government takeover of health care.”
“This trillion-dollar tragedy is just bad medicine,” Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., said.
A key development in the legislative fight occurred Sunday afternoon, when the White House announced Obama would issue an executive order asserting the health care bill would not interfere with an existing ban on federal funding for abortions.
“While the legislation as written maintains current law,” White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said in a statement, “the executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.”
The move was intended as a signal to conservative Democrats in the House, led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, that they can lend their votes to health care legislation.
In a news conference after the White House announcement, Stupak and six of his Democratic colleagues said they would vote for the bill. Making no apologies for holding the bill up until the agreement was reached, Stupak said: “We’ve all stood on principle. . . . We’ve always said we were for health care reform, but there was a principle that means more to us than anything — the sanctity of life.”
Republicans urged abortion opponents not to be swayed.
“An executive order is not law,” Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., argued on the House floor.
Under the legislation, most Americans for the first time would be required to purchase insurance, and they would face penalties if they failed to do so. The bill includes billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to make insurance more affordable, and it also provides for an expansion of Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor.
The health care legislation would extend coverage to about 32 million uninsured people and would impose new rules on insurance companies to prevent them from denying benefits because of preexisting conditions. To help those who must buy their own insurance, it would establish insurance exchanges to increase competition among insurance companies.
It calls for new taxes and fees as well as cuts in Medicare, the insurance program for the elderly.
Democrats argue the cuts would eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, and Republicans contend the cuts would decrease services for the aged.
The health care plan would cost $940 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Republicans disputed the numbers.
“The oldest trick in the book in Washington is you can manipulate a bill to manipulate the results,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told the House. “This bill is a fiscal Frankenstein.”
In a closed-door caucus for Democrats before the vote, Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement who reportedly faced racial epithets from protesters outside the Capitol on Saturday, reminded his colleagues they were acting on health care on the 45th anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. Lewis was beaten in an infamous confrontation with police during the first of those marches.
On the House floor later, Lewis emotionally implored his colleagues to “answer the call of history. . . . Give health care a chance.”
Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., quoted his father, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a career-long champion of health care reform.
“The parallel between the struggle for civil rights and the fight to make health care affordable for all Americans is significant,” Kennedy said. “Health care is not only a civil right. It’s a moral issue.”
Democrats and Obama plan to devote the next few months to making sure consumers understand its benefits of the bill. One of the most important documents in their arsenal is a list prepared by their leadership of the provisions of the bill that kick in almost immediately, including the guarantee children will not be denied coverage for preexisting conditions and the provision allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ policies.
But some Democrats are still anxious voters will now blame the president and the Democrats for everything that goes wrong — from long lines at the pharmacy to delays in processing insurance claims — whether they are attributable to the health care bill or not.

FirstAlert: State of the Union Wrap Up

Chase Snider — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:15:27 +0000

By Christi Parsons and Janet Hook
Tribune Washington Bureau
(MCT)
WASHINGTON — Fighting to regain his political footing, President Barack Obama on Wednesday thrust job creation to the top of his agenda even as he offered a feisty defense of the stalled agenda that has consumed his first year in office, including his health care initiative, climate change legislation and new restrictions on banks.
The president, in his first State of the Union address, pledged compassion for people struggling in the nation’s sour economy and dedication to the cause of assisting them.
“The worst of the storm has passed,” Obama said of the financial sector meltdown that helped bring on a deep recession and double-digit unemployment. “But the devastation remains.” He said that “jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010″ and called for new spending to promote jobs growth.
Obama enumerated a host of challenges but focused solidly on joblessness and the national economy. The prescriptions he offered were not dramatically different than those he offered almost a year ago when he first addressed lawmakers as the newly elected president, as he called for investing in small business, green jobs and clean energy. He promised to spur the export of American products, crack down on Wall Street excess and enact fiscal reform that targets debt and deficits.
But while the words were similar, the context was radically changed.
Last year he talked about moving forward with progressive policies on a scale akin to that of Franklin Roosevelt. On Wednesday, he spoke as a politician battered for a year by opponents and his signature health care effort in jeopardy after a stunning loss of the Democratic Senate seat in the blue state of Massachusetts. Party leaders are scrambling to stop the stampede of Democratic Congress members considering a new line of work.
The ideas he outlined were still big — fighting global warming, fixing immigration policy and making long-term investments in economic growth — but the solutions were fine-pointed. He peppered his speech with demands for change in the Washington playbook, for instance, and then called on lawmakers to establish a single Web site for disclosing all the special-funding requests before they come to a vote.
That information is already posted on the Web, but Obama wants it all in one place.
To boost the economy, Obama proposed taking $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid from their bailouts and using it to help community banks give credit to small business.
He announced funding to begin a new nationwide high-speed rail system and urged the Senate to pass a financial reform package. He called for an end to tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and said the money should go to reward those who do otherwise. His budget, due on Monday, will include new investments in technology to diversify energy sources and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Obama also touted his plan to help middle class families by doubling the child-care tax credit. Vowing that the federal government would tighten its belt, too, Obama pledged to freeze discretionary spending on non-security items amounting to about an eighth of the federal budget.
Still, even experts with an affinity for his views suggested that Obama’s plans were small-bore.
“I wouldn’t say the economic challenges have changed much,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “What has changed is the ambitions. The big ambitions are gone.”
A new edge to the Obama persona was evident, however, as when he admonished Republican leadership that, if they vote as a group against every piece of business before the Senate, “the responsibility to govern is now yours, as well.”
At several points, Obama seemed like a beleaguered, misunderstood president struggling to explain himself — a surprising tone to strike for a young leader who stood on the podium a year ago with soaring popularity and deep reservoirs of good will.
Obama spent a lot of time in the speech “setting the record straight’ by saying he had cut taxes and that the budget deficit that had been built up “before I even walked in the door.”
He said he was forced by events to support a bank bailout.
“If there’s one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it’s that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal,” the president said to laughter.
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Jim Tankersley and Kim Geiger contributed to this report from Washington.
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(c) 2010, Tribune Co.

Videos from the Nation's Capitol – KHS Students sounds off

Chase Snider — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:12:03 +0000

View all the latest videos from the Kickapoo High School Journalism Department’s trip to Washington D.C. We will continue to post more videos as they become available.