WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is calling on lawmakers to revisit healthcare at a White House summit – this time before a live camera.
In a highly televised pre-Super Bowl interview with CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric on Sunday, Obama announced his plans to try and break the partisan stalemate over healthcare reform.
Obama, who met with Republican leaders on Jan. 29 to discuss healthcare reform, said he will meet this week with Democratic leaders. He then plans to call both party leaders to the White House for an all-day summit to discuss healthcare reform point-by-point in front of a camera.
"If we can go step-by-step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then procedurally, there's no reason why we can't do it a lot faster than the process took," he told Couric.
When questioned about the earmarks used to help pass the Senate health reform bill on Christmas Eve, Obama said they "frustrated" him and did not help to build the public's confidence in Washington.
"I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically-approved approach to healthcare, and didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it and just go ahead and have that passed," he said. "But that's not how it works in our democracy."
Obama said the use of earmarks to pass a bill shows that lawmakers "don't have the larger public interest at heart." Recently, he proposed that Congress post their earmarks online for the public to view.
In a statement following the president's interview, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said Republicans "always appreciate the opportunity to share ideas with the president," but the impasse on healthcare reform can only be broken if Democrats scrap what is on the table.
"Setting these proposals aside would be a sign that the administration and Democrats in Congress are listening to the country and are truly interested in a bipartisan approach," he said.
The Democrat plan to push their healthcare reform packages through without Republican backing was brought to a halt earlier last month with a surprising Republican victory in Massachusetts, where Scott Brown was elected to replace long-time Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy, who passed away last year. The election of Brown took away the so-called "super majority" that the Democrats had needed to curtail a Republican filibuster of the healthcare reform package on the table.
Obama had hoped to pass healthcare reform in 2009.
