President Obama has regularly paid homage to ailing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., for showing leadership trying to revamp the U.S. health care system. But now that the Congressional Budget Office has put a $1 trillion price tag on a preliminary draft of a Kennedy health bill and concluded it would reduce the ranks of uninsured Americans by about one-third, or 16 million, administration officials are trying to put just a bit of space between the White House and the liberal icon.
Team Obama is acutely sensitive to concerns that it is creating an expensive government-supervised health system -- a charge that congressional Republicans are lobbing with glee.
Obama had barely finished addressing the American Medical Association on the need for an overhaul plan Monday when GOP senators and members pounced on the CBO forecast, charging that "the Democratic plan" Kennedy crafted would force millions of working Americans to lose the care they get now, by creating a public insurance option that would compete with private health plans.
"These early reports from CBO show that this bill will cost too much, cover too few, and cause too many to lose the coverage they enjoy now," Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee said in a statement.
The 10 Republicans on the HELP committee even wrote Obama, politely suggesting that Kennedy's legislation was out of sync with the president's oft-stated desire to expand health coverage options while allowing workers to keep their existing coverage, if they choose.
Asked about the forecast on Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs nonchalantly dismissed the numbers, saying they were based on "an old, incomplete proposal." The cost of doing nothing is far greater than some preliminary estimate, Gibbs explained, because maintaining the status quo will bankrupt the nation by accelerating surging health costs.
"This has many twists and turns to go," Gibbs said of the health care debate, in one of the day's big understatements. "One incomplete, older proposal is not indicative of where we are now."
![[RSS]](http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/templates/images/rss_icon.gif){kind=icon}
![[ARCHIVES]](http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/templates/images/archives_icon.png){kind=icon}
Post A Comment