Word: reform
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From the outset, President Barack Obama's strategy on health-care reform has been to study everything the Clinton Administration did in 1993 and '94 - and do the opposite. Where Bill and Hillary Clinton delivered a byzantine bill of more than 1,300 pages to Capitol Hill, only to see it shredded once it got there, Obama has kept his distance from the fine print. He set forth a few ambitious goals: expanding coverage, reining in health-care spending, improving medical quality. And then he left it to Congress to develop a plan that could win the votes necessary...
...well. Congressional chairmen usually prefer having control to being told what to do by the White House. And interest groups and political adversaries that had been on opposite sides of past health-care battles were at the negotiating table, in no small part because Obama had convinced them that reform was really going to happen this time. As a result, the legislative process is already further along than it ever got under Clinton. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From...
...wants to accelerate the process, he may have to abandon his original hands-off strategy and start getting more deeply involved. Growing numbers of Democrats are arguing behind closed doors that Obama could ease their qualms if he were clearer about where his red lines are for health-care reform. While the President insists, for instance, that he wants to see a public plan in the legislation, he has refused to spell out in detail what it should look like. Meanwhile, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been talking up the possibility of setting up a public plan...
...Clinton retreated from them when the Senate balked. That vote was one of the major factors behind the massive defeat House Democrats suffered in 1994, and some Representatives are wondering whether they might "get BTU'd" again if they stick their necks out for an ambitious health-care-reform bill that gets watered down in the Senate. "We all like Rahm," a Democratic House member told me. "But we also remember where he was in 1993." Back then, Emanuel was a top Clinton White House strategist...
...Between now and then, White House officials say, don't be surprised to see rough spots and bumps along the road. "Everybody wants to rush the process and jump to conclusions," sighs an aide. "The process will play itself out." The question is, Will there be health-care reform...