Healthcare In Crisis: Obama's healthcare trade-off

Monday, August 17, 2009

Obama's healthcare trade-off

Dropping insistence on a public insurance option boosts the chances for his overall reform effort.

By dropping his insistence on a public insurance option in an overhaul of the nation's healthcare system, President Obama angered some liberals but took a big step toward winning over moderate Democratic lawmakers -- a trade-off that sharply improves the chances Congress will approve the overhaul.

By backing away from the "government plan" -- which would have offered consumers an alternative to private medical insurance -- Obama also moved to neutralize one of his opponents' most effective arguments, namely that the president wants the government to play a bigger role in individual healthcare decisions.

Obama's tactical retreat improved the odds of passage for other key provisions: easing small businesses' efforts to cover workers, for example, or prohibiting insurers from denying or canceling coverage because of medical conditions.

The political gain on Capitol Hill was clear in the reaction today of Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia, one of five Democrats to vote against the bill when it passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July. Boucher said backing away from the public option had strengthened Obama's hand among conservative Democrats and other skeptics without compromising the basic goal of lowering healthcare costs and insuring more people.

Dropping that option from the bill, Boucher said, "creates the opportunity to pass the healthcare bill. As long as there was insistence on a government-operated plan, that opportunity did not exist.

"A government-operated healthcare plan is not essential to an effective healthcare reform," he added.

Still, the White House is expressing its position in calibrated language that does not give up on the notion that a new healthcare system would include a government-run plan. But the administration is now signaling in much clearer terms that the absence of a public option is not a deal-killer.

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Statistics Collection

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