[ht cagle ]
Flacking for President Barack Obama’s “new” health care plan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters assembled for yesterday’s press briefing: “The president posted ideas of his on the White House website today. We hope Republicans will post their ideas either on their website, or we’d be happy to post them on ours, so that the American people could come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday.” And this might have been a small bit of successful Obama administration gamesmanship on health care and transparency in government except for one small problem: reality. Not only do House Republicans already have their own health care plan, not only is it already available online, but the White House’s own website already links to it!
And speaking of the President’s behind-closed-doors plan, don’t believe any of those headlines showing a $950 billion price tag. That is an Obama administration-
created number that should not be afforded any more credibility than Gibbs’ grasp of the contents of his own website. In fact, the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published this about the President’s new plan yesterday:
Preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.
In other words, even with over a year to prepare for the moment they would finally release their own plan, the White House could only manage to obtain an “incomplete” grade from the official budget scorekeeper in Washington. So every time you hear the President say “my plan is paid for” or “my plan reduces the deficit,” just remember you are going to have to take his word for it.
[ht to the foundry ]
To hear President Barack Obama tell it these days, the Oval Office has been wide open to Republicans on health care reform for the past year.
And Republicans claim Democrats locked them out of the talks from the get-go, writing hyperpartisan bills that catered to their base.
Neither is true.
Ahead of next week’s White House summit on health care, both parties are pressing story lines on how the reform debate has played out that aren’t as tidy or truthful as Democrats and Republicans would like voters to believe.
The Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six negotiations make it hard for Republicans to honestly say they had no seat at the table. But the decision by Obama to ignore House Republicans for months, even as they sent letters seeking meetings, undercuts his claim to now want to work with the GOP.
The summit could help reset the negotiations, but with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, other top administration officials and 37 lawmakers all in attendance, the likelihood of a serious breakthrough appears dim.
As the meeting approaches, here are the top five myths being floated by one party or the other.
Myth No. 1: Republicans were sidelined in Congress
“We weren’t even involved in this process; we weren’t even asked.” — Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in a Jan. 24 appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union”
The way many Senate Democrats saw it, Republicans had more influence last summer in writing the Finance Committee bill than they did.
Until September, two of the Senate’s most conservative members and moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) helped pull the bill further and further away from the liberal Democratic ideal. Snowe and Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Mike Enzi of Wyoming spent 63 hours negotiating with Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and two other moderate Democrats, Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
Hatch himself participated in the talks until July.
If anyone was sidelined at this stage of the health care reform debate, it was progressives, whose impatience with the bipartisan process often boiled over when Baucus met with Democratic Finance Committee members during tense private sessions.
And in public, Obama bucked up the bipartisan approach. He spoke by phone daily with Baucus throughout the hot summer negotiations, invited the Gang of Six into the Oval Office for updates and defended the bipartisan talks at a particularly critical juncture. During an August visit to Montana, Obama embraced Baucus’s strategy — at a time when most congressional Democrats were furious about it.
Posted by Matt
Ahead of next week’s White House health reform summit, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signed on to a plan to try to resurrect the public insurance option in the Senate and signaled a willingness to use a 51-vote majority if needed to get it through.
Reid’s announcement came as the White House went ahead with plans to craft its own health reform proposal ahead of the summit, a plan that could pass with 51 votes in the Senate, bypassing the threat of a Republican filibuster, according to Democratic officials.
But the moves by Reid and President Barack Obama toward using the procedural maneuver called reconciliation threatened to set off a revolt among Senate moderates, many of whom have expressed serious reservations or outright resistance to the idea.
And Republicans would be sure to pounce on any move by Democrats to short-circuit the 60-vote supermajority rules in the Senate, calling it a procedural gimmick to ram through a health care bill that has proved unpopular with many voters.
