WASHINGTON – At a White House healthcare summit held Thursday, President Barack Obama urged Republican congressional leaders to consider working on several areas of common interest in the healthcare reform package, giving them a rough 6-week deadline before Democrats may consider using alternative measures to pass the plan.
Obama named health insurance reform, the purchase of health insurance across state lines and medical liability reform among the top three areas where agreement could possibly be reached.
Republicans argued they wanted to scrap all proposals on the table and rework a set of smaller steps to reform healthcare.
For Democrats, starting over is not an option they said, because of the dire situation many Americans face.
According to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), 14,000 Americans lose their healthcare daily, while six to eight Americans die per day because of no health insurance.
Democrats said healthcare reform is interconnected and cannot be tackled one step at a time. "We can't handle healthcare incrementally," Dodd said. "It has to be dealt with holistically. You can't get to quality and affordability, if you don't deal with coverage."
Much of the day's debate focused on coverage and whether or not it could be expanded without including more people in the insurance pool.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said, "If you don't bring more people in together, the only people who get a break are the people who are healthy. People who are sick pay more. Is that what we want in this country?"
Republicans at the summit backed a health reform plan proposed by House Minority Leader John Beohner of Ohio, which would expand healthcare to some 3 million uninsured Americans.
The Democrat House and Senate bills, passed last year, would extend coverage to 30 million.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the unspoken issue overriding the entire summit was the threat of Democrats using an alternative measure to pass a bill with a simple majority, rather than the 60 that would be normally required in the Senate.
The special mechanism, called "reconciliation," was never meant to be used for issues that involve 17 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, as healthcare does, McCain said.
President Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would not guarantee that they would not use the method to pass a healthcare reform bill, when asked directly by several Republicans during the summit.
Obama said, "We cannot have another year-long debate about this."
"So the question that I'm going to ask myself and I ask of all of you is, is there enough serious effort that in a month's time or a few weeks' time or six weeks' time, we could actually resolve something," Obama said. "And if we can't, then I think we've got to go ahead and make some decisions and then that's what elections are for."
"We have honest disagreements about the vision for the country and we'll go ahead and test those out over the next several months till November," he said.
