A final agreement nearly in hand, Democrats, White House close in on health bill Democrats, President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders are about to embark on one last sales job that will determine the outcome of the president’s signature health care overhaul.
It will come down to a phenomenal effort by congressional leaders and the White House to win over skittish lawmakers after a year of incendiary debate, even as Obama keeps up campaign-style appearances designed to fire up public support.
A closed-door meeting in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office Wednesday evening moved congressional leaders and administration officials close to agreement on such issues as additional subsidies to help lower-income families purchase health insurance and more aid for states under the Medicaid program for low-income Americans.
Democrats still need to see a final cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office – and want to ensure it stays around $950 billion over 10 years – but they made plans to begin to read the bill to rank-and-file Democrats at a caucus meeting Thursday.
“We’re going to get started,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said after her meeting with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other key officials. Some unanswered questions remain, Pelosi said, “but we’re hoping that we’ll get those answered over the course of the reading. It’s not much.”
“I’m very pleased about where we are,” she said.
Obama invited members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to meet with him Thursday at the White House to discuss the health legislation. The White House also said Obama would travel to northeastern Ohio on Monday for an appearance near the hometown of an uninsured cancer patient named Natoma Canfield, whom the president has made a symbol of the need for reform.
President Barack Obama, making a final push for healthcare reform, will back bipartisan plans to stamp out waste in government-run medical programs for the old and needy, the White House said on Tuesday
Obama will unveil the proposal during a visit to St. Charles, Missouri on Wednesday to rally popular support for his key domestic policy objective, as the bitter battle over healthcare enters its final weeks. The White House said the new effort to root out improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid, could double taxpayer savings over the next three years to at least $2 billion.
“We cannot afford nor should we tolerate this waste of taxpayer dollars,” the White House said.
An estimated $54 billion was lost through improper Medicare and Medicaid payments in 2009. Medicare is the government-run program covering elderly Americans and Medicaid is for the country’s poorest.
Obama is seeking to crack down on waste and fraud as his administration strives to secure an overhaul of the $2.5 trillion healthcare system to contain costs and expand coverage to tens of millions of more Americans.
The action endorses Republican-backed proposals on cheats, in a gesture designed to highlight Obama’s commitment to embrace opposition ideas alongside his own Democratic Party.
The plan will offer private auditors a share of the money that they recoup in order to encourage them to dig deeper to uncover improper payments under Medicare and Medicaid.
Obama will also back bipartisan legislation to expand the ability of government agencies to undertake these so-called payment recapture audits by providing more funds.
Support from his own party in doubt, President Barack Obama summoned more than a dozen House Democrats to the White House Thursday, pleading with them to put aside their qualms, seize a historic moment and vote for his massive health care overhaul.
It’s the opportunity of a generation, he told them — and a chance to revive the party’s agenda after his rough first year in office.
In back-to-back meetings in the Oval Office and Roosevelt Room, Obama urged uneasy rank-and-file moderates and progressives to focus on the positives rather than their deep disappointment with parts of the bill. The lawmakers said Obama assured them the legislation was merely the first step, and he promised to work with them in the future to improve its provisions.
“The president very pointedly talked about how important this is historically,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., “how he needs our help.” Obama told them that “‘this is an opportunity, it’ll give us momentum’” on other issues, the congressman said.
Cranking up the pressure, congressional leaders said they were hoping for votes on the legislation in as soon as two or three weeks.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters he believes the House is on schedule to approve the landmark legislation by March 18, when the president leaves for an Asian trip, and he can sign it into law “shortly thereafter.”
Concerned about fellow Democrats’ trepidation about a legislative drive that has garnered only modest public support, House leaders expressed optimism but hardly certainty that they would nail down enough support that soon. Democrats have repeatedly missed self-imposed deadlines for moving the legislation.
Obama’s revved-up personal involvement, along with the cautious tone of congressional leaders’ forecasts, illustrated the uncertainty still facing the president’s yearlong drive to push his signature legislative initiative through Congress. The outcome is important for all Americans, since the changes would affect the ways nearly everyone receives and pays for health care and failure to act would leave in place a system that many find lacking and that leaves out tens of millions of people.
Under the current strategy, Democratic leaders want Congress to send Obama the nearly $1 trillion health overhaul that the Senate passed in December, plus a separate bill making changes that House Democrats want. But there’s no decision yet on exactly what that second measure will look like
(Corbis)
Armenian orphans in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, board a ship bound for Greece. The ship was laid on during World War One by Near East Relief, an American charity
WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Ankara and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.
In Ankara, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” said the statement. It said that Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, was being recalled to Ankara, the Turkish capital, for consultations.
Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.
A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said Thursday that Mrs. Clinton had told Representative Howard L. Berman, the committee chairman, late Wednesday that a vote would be harmful, jeopardizing Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts that last year yielded two protocols aimed at a thawing of relations.
President Obama spoke to the President Abdullah Gul of Turkey on Wednesday to endorse the efforts at normalization with Armenia, said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman.
“We’ve pressed hard to see the progress that we’ve seen to date, and we certainly do not want to see that jeopardized,” he said.
The timing of the administration’s plea seemed to catch some committee members by surprise. Early in the meeting on Thursday, the ranking Republican member, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, declared that the administration had taken no position on the vote. But several minutes later she requested time to correct herself: an aide had handed her a wire-service story describing the administration’s newly announced opposition.
Suat Kiniklioglu, a Turkish member of Parliament in Washington to meet with lawmakers, said later that he thought the intervention by Mrs. Clinton — who was asked about the resolution last week before the same House committee but did not then condemn it explicitly — had come too late.
“It was done in a fashion to be able to allow this administration to say in future, when things go wrong, that they did intervene” in support of Turkey, he said.
Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, also said he doubted Mrs. Clinton’s intervention changed much. He said of the vote: “It was closer than anticipated but at the end of the day the truth prevailed and the members made a very affirmative statement in the face of the opposition.”
Committee members were clearly torn between what they said was a moral obligation to condemn one of the darkest periods of the last century and the need to protect an ongoing relationship with a NATO partner vital to American regional and security interests, on issues from Afghanistan to Iran.
“This is not one of those issues that members of Congress look forward to voting on,” said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York.
Like nearly every member, Mr. Berman saluted Turkey as an important ally. “Be that as it may,” he added, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”
“The Turks say passing this resolution could have terrible consequences for our bilateral relationship,” Mr. Berman said. “But I believe that Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.”
While still in the Senate, Mr. Obama had described the killings of Armenians at Ottoman hands as genocide. Mrs. Clinton, also then a senator, had taken a similar stance.
Last year, she strongly supported talks that led to two protocols between Turkey and Armenia calling for closer ties, open borders and the creation of a commission to examine the historical evidence in dispute.
Those accords, not yet ratified by either nation’s parliament, could now be endangered, opponents of the resolution said. “This is a fragile process that destabilizes the protocols,” said Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana.
In Istanbul, Ozdem Sanberk of Global Political Trends Center at Istanbul Kultur University, agreed that the protocols would suffer. “With this result,” he said, “the effectiveness of the ethnic lobbies got maximized and American foreign policy got hurt.”
In 1915, the decaying Ottoman Empire launched a pogrom against eastern Turkey’s Armenian population, falsely accusing them of supporting a Russian invasion. Tens of thousands of men were shot and hundreds of thousands of women and children driven out of their homes and on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been a million people.
It was also one of the century’s first atrocities to be photographically covered; there are anonymous photographs and there are signed and documented photographs that corroborated witness accounts. A German military officer Armin T. Wegner, stationed with the 6th Ottoman Army, took a series of photographs of dying and dead Armenians. These pictures anticipates photographs that were to follow during the Second World War, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
In fact, the international nonchalance over the Armenian genocide emboldened Hitler. In his August 1939, he spoke “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” in an haunting harbinger of his own Holocaust. “The world believes only in success,” he added, justifying his potential invasion of Poland and all the deeds that would follow that calamitous event.
