Obama Shows Bias at Health Care Summit
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 ]
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