Pelosi, Reid offer health bill optimism after meeting with Obama

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Sep 9 2009

After a White House meeting with President Barack Obama Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said there is "plenty to work with" to successfully overhaul the U.S. healthcare system, Reuters reports. She added that healthcare reform "will be done in a fiscally sound way."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who also attended the meeting, said Democrats will try to pass a healthcare reform bill without Republicans only if there is no alternative (Maler, 9/8).

Reid "said there is agreement on '90 percent' of the substance of a health-care overhaul," Bloomberg reports. "Reid said Obama didn't give them a preview of his address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow night." He added that "Obama didn't give them a preview of his address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow night" (Chen, 9/8).

This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.