IT LOOKS increasingly likely that President Barack Obama will be forced to abandon hopes of cross-party support for healthcare reform, after Senator Max Baucus unveiled his long-awaited healthcare reform plan yesterday without the support of a single Republican senator.
Mr Baucus, the chairman of the Senate finance committee, has worked for months with a panel of three Republicans and three Democrats known as the “gang of six” to draw up legislation acceptable to both parties.
In his quest for agreement, Mr Baucus made substantial concessions to the Republicans, including a lower price tag – $856 billion (€581 billion) over 10 years, compared with $1 trillion for plans proposed by the Senate health committee and three House panels.
He dropped the requirement that employers provide healthcare insurance for employees, instead allowing them to pay a maximum penalty of $400 per worker. And he ignored Democratic Party demands for a public insurance option that would compete with private insurance companies. Mr Baucus is notorious for receiving large contributions from the healthcare lobby.
Mr Baucus also promised to address specific concerns raised by Republicans: that illegal immigrants be banned from subsidised insurance; limits on medical malpractice lawsuits; and a ban on federal subsidies for abortion. To no avail.
Senator Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on Mr Baucus’s panel, said yesterday’s deadline was “artificial” and that the proposed Bill “does not meet the shared goals for affordable, accessible health coverage”. The Baucus plan has also been criticised by the senator’s fellow Democrats.
Senator Ron Wyden says it places an undue burden on the lower middle class, who could find themselves paying up to 13 per cent of their income for insurance. Senator John D Rockefeller said there was “no way” he could vote for the Bill in its present form because of the absence of a public option.
Mr Obama has adopted a more proprietorial attitude on the healthcare issue this week. “I intend to be president for a while and once this Bill passes, I own it . . . I’m the one who’s going to be held responsible,” he told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme.
Mr Obama is taking the campaign for healthcare into his own hands, with a planned “roadblock” of interviews on five political chat shows next Sunday, followed by an appearance on David Letterman’s Late Show on Monday night.
“Healthcare can’t wait. It can’t wait,” Mr Obama told the AFL-CIO trade union convention in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. Greedy chief executives, “reckless” bankers and “insurance companies that pad their profits but aren’t improving care” were the villains in his fiery speech.
The working class audience in Pittsburgh cheered rapturously; one woman shouted, “I love you!” It was in marked contrast to the cool reception Mr Obama received on Wall Street the previous day. At least one television commentator detected a note of class warfare in the combative Pittsburgh speech.
Meanwhile, former president Jimmy Carter gave voice to a widespread and growing suspicion among liberals: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Mr Carter told NBC. Continuing racism was “an abominable circumstance”, he added.
On Tuesday afternoon, the House passed a “resolution of disapproval” against Representative Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie” at Mr Obama during his address on healthcare to a joint session of Congress last week.
Mr Wilson became only the second representative to be chastised thus in a decade. The dispute over his heckling of the president stirred tensions going back to the 19th-century war of secession. Mr Wilson once belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and campaigned to keep the Confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina.
Representative Hank Johnson said Mr Wilson’s outburst “instigated” racism. If Mr Wilson was not rebuked, Mr Johnson predicted, “I guess we’ll have folks putting on white hoods and robes again and riding through the countryside intimidating people.”
Mr Wilson’s wife Roxanne’s video testimonial became an instant hit on US television. She said she asked him: “Who’s the nut that hollered out, ‘You lie’ or ‘You liar?’” Though she thought her husband was treated unfairly by Congress, Mrs Wilson admitted, “I couldn’t believe that Joe would say that.”
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