U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Vice President Joe Biden walk across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Blair House where the President is hosting a bipartisan meeting with members of Congress to discuss health reform legislation in Washington on February 25, 2010. UPI/Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool |
License Photo
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Democrats and Republicans went back and forth Thursday about whether they were on the cusp of agreeing on principles of reforming the U.S. healthcare system.
"(We) have to start by taking the current bill and putting it on the shelf and starting from a clean sheet of paper," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said during President Barack Obama's bipartisan healthcare summit. "We've come to the conclusion that we don't do comprehensive well. Our country's too big, too complicated, too decentralized to (comprehensively) rewrite the rules."
Alexander listed six areas -- small-business healthcare plans, buying insurance across state lines, ending junk lawsuits, providing states incentives to lower costs, expanding health savings accounts and action to remove insurance companies' ability to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition.
"They're just six steps," Alexander said. "(They) maybe the first six, but combined with six others and six more and six others, they get us in the right direction."
Alexander said the Senate and House bills would cut Medicare by about $500 million and spend the funds on new programs, "not on Medicare and making it stronger, even though it's going broke in 2015."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said healthcare reform meant entitlement reform.
"Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost," she said. "We have a moral obligation to reduce the deficit and not heap mountains of debt onto the next generation."
A plan for reform is "not about healthcare for America, but about a healthier America" that would include affordability, accessibility and accountability, she said.
Alexander closed with a "suggestion and a request" that congressional Democrats and Obama abandon the possibility of using reconciliation -- which requires a simple majority, not 60 votes -- to pass healthcare reform.
"You can say that this process has been used before, and that would be right," he said. "But it's never been used for anything like this."
"No one has talked about reconciliation, but that's what you folks have talked about ever since that came out, as if it's something that has never been done before," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid shot back.
Obama said the group should focus on substance, not process, because substantial agreement on issues "would then help to dictate how we move forward."
"It may turn out on the other hand there's just too big of a gulf, and then we'll have to figure out how we proceed from there," he said.
