Posted by Matt
In pushing the health care reform bill yesterday, President Obama said, ”At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem.”
WASHINGTON–U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech to be delivered on Wednesday, will urge Congress to move swiftly to pass legislation overhauling the U.S. healthcare system, a White House official said.
Obama
will deliver the speech in the White House at 1.45 p.m. (1845 GMT). The White House has said the president will chart the way forward in overhauling the United States’ troubled $2.5 trillion healthcare system,
The White House wants a do-over for February’s yet-to-be released jobs numbers, arguing that the blizzards that hammered the country last month also dented the economic recovery.
Though the February unemployment figures are not out yet, White House economic adviser Larry Summers is already lowering expectations and claiming that winter weather is to blame for any posted decline.
In an interview with CNBC, Summers urged the country not to make any judgments about where the economy is headed based on the upcoming statistics.
“Who knows what the next number is going to be. The blizzards that affected much of the country during the last month are likely to distort the statistics, and in past blizzards those statistics have been distorted by 100,000 to 200,000 jobs, so it’s going to be very important … to look past whatever the next figures are to gauge the underlying trends,” he said.
Summers has clearly noted the dismal weekly employment data that’s come out and is bracing for some bad news at the end of the week.
Posted by Matt
President Barack Obama closed Wednesday’s healthcare summit by stating his willingness to use controversial rules to pass healthcare with a simple majority vote.
Obama insisted at the highly-anticipated healthcare summit aimed at bringing the parties together that he hoped to win Republican support. But in the end, he made it clear that he intends to move forward with or without the GOP.
“We cannot have another yearlong debate about this,” Obama said. “When it comes to the most contentious issue, I’m not sure we can bridge the gap.”
Obama put Republicans on notice that he is not willing to start over again, as they demanded, on a healthcare reform debate that dominated much of the last year.
He added that he is open to waiting only a few weeks for the GOP to change its political tack and support healthcare reform.
“I think the concern that a lot of the colleagues in the House and the Senate on the Democratic side have is that after a year and a half of dealing with this issue, they suspect that starting over means not doing much,” Obama said at the close of a day-long bipartisan healthcare reform summit he hosted at Blair House.
“Politically speaking, there may not be any reasons for Republicans wanting to do anything.”
Not surprisingly, Republicans evinced little interest in moving in Obama’s direction. “What we think they ought to do is start over and go step by step and target possible areas of agreement talked about in the meeting today,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
[ht to the hill ]
