Pelosi urged Obama to not cut back on health care plan

The New York Times recounts the steps Democrats took to regroup on the health overhaul legislation after losing their filibuster proof majority in the Senate after Massachusetts voters elected Republican Scott Brown in January. According to the Times account, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped steer President Barack Obama away from a more modest approach on health care. '"We're in the majority,' Ms. Pelosi told the president. 'We'll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we've got right now. We can make this work," the paper reported.

"Now, in what could become a legislative Lazarus tale — or at least the most riveting cliffhanger of the Obama presidency so far— the House is set to take up the health bill for what Democrats hope will be the last time. For Mr. Obama, who vowed earlier this month to do 'everything in my power' to see the bill to fruition, the measure's passage would be an extraordinary triumph. Its defeat could weaken him for the rest of his days in office. ... But the story of how he did it is not his alone. It is the story of how a struggling president partnered with a pair of experienced legislators — Ms. Pelosi and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Reid — to reach for a goal that Mr. Obama has often said had eluded his predecessors going back to Theodore Roosevelt" (Stolberg, Zeleny and Hulse, 3/20).

Politico also offers a behind the scenes recounting of those past weeks,  reporting that Pelosi made "clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push - dismissing the White House chief of staff [Rahm Emanuel] as an 'incrementalist.' Pelosi even coined a term to describe Emanuel's scaled-down approach: 'Kiddie Care,' according to a person privy to the call. ..."

"The rebirth of the reform effort is the result of a little luck, insurance company avarice, a subsiding of post-Brown panic among party incumbents and the calculation by many Hill Democrats that going small or giving up was just as politically perilous as going big. But the main reason the bill has made it to the floor has as much to do with the complex, occasionally tense, ever-evolving partnership between the first African-American president and the first female speaker" (Budoff Brown and Thrush, 3/20)

The Washington Post reports that although President Obama did not declare victory in his remarks to House Democrats Saturday, the comments "betrayed a new ambition: selling the benefits to the American people once the congressional battle is over. Obama's speech, which cable news networks carried live, appeared designed to begin the pivot toward the fall elections. And it demonstrated to nervous lawmakers how they might rehabilitate the legislation among skeptical constituents. ... Obama's advice Saturday to Democrats was unambiguous: When you are campaigning this fall, sell this new law as a mainstream, middle-class, middle-of-the-road effort, not the radical approach that opponents have described. ... He even offered Democrats a slogan for the bill, which fits easily on a bumper sticker: 'This is a Patient's Bill of Rights on steroids'" (Shear, 3/21).

In a separate column, The Washington Post's Dan Balz reports: "As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost. By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history. ... But unlike Social Security or Medicare, Obama's health-care bill would pass over the Republican Party's unanimous opposition. ... Democrats are afraid of failure and nervous about what success could bring. They fear substantial losses in November, with their majorities in the House and Senate possibly at risk if the country turns even more negative toward the administration and its policies. Republicans vow to continue challenging the program at the state and national levels" (Balz, 3/21).

The Christian Science Monitor offers a timetable for the provisions of the bill: "Even if health care reform legislation passes, major health care reforms will be years away. ... [S]ome big changes would take place immediately if that happens. But some of the most important provisions of the mammoth health bill aren't set to take effect until 2014, or even later. As we said in the first installment of this plain-English series on what's in the health bill, healthcare reform is a big, rambling, Rube Goldbergian machine" (Grier, 3/20).

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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.