President Obama acknowledged Wednesday that his strategy to pass health-care reform has not been effective because he deferred to Congress too much and should have been more specific earlier in the process about what he wanted to do.
In a separate interview, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Mr. Obama will again cite a need for a public option on health insurance when he gives his prime-time speech tonight to the nation.
Asked on CBS’s “The Early Show” whether Mr. Obama was willing to abandon a government-run plan to get a bill through Congress, Mr. Gibbs replied, “No, the president tonight will talk about the public option and will talk about the need for competition” with the private insurance market.
The president said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that his mistake allowed misinformation about reform to gain prominence in the debate. It’s a problem Mr. Obama said he will try to remedy in tonight’s speech to a joint session of Congress — the most high stakes political moment of his early presidency.
The Obama administration’s deferential posture toward Congress has been an attempt to avoid President Clinton’s disastrous failure to reform health care in 1993, when his administration laid out a detailed bill early in the process. Critics picked apart the proposal piece by piece.
Mr. Obama’s admission was the first time he has indicated the White House’s grand strategy was, at least in part, a bad idea.
“I, out of an effort to let Congress do their thing and not step on their toes, probably left too much ambiguity out there, which allowed opponents of reform to come in and fill up the airwaves with a lot of nonsense,” he said.
Mr. Obama blamed “unyielding partisanship” in the political process for talking about “everything from this ridiculous idea that we were setting up death panels, to false notions that this was designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, then this broader notion of a government takeover of health care.”
He said “none of the bills that have worked their way through Congress ever envisioned” government-run health care.
“So the intent of the speech is to make sure the American people are clear exactly what it is we are proposing,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Gibbs told reporters later Wednesday morning that Mr. Obama is still working on the speech and will likely not finish until this afternoon.
The spokesman also said the president returned Monday from Camp David with “many” handwritten pages of notes that he gave to speechwriters.
Mr. Obama has already said he will continue to support the so-called “public option,” but did not say Wednesday whether he would veto a bill if it did not include such a feature.
However, he said he would not sign a bill that increased the deficit by “one dime.”
“If it is not fully paid for, then I will not be supportive,” he said.
A report released Wednesday morning on the financial impact of the reform bill in the House beyond the first 10 years shows the federal deficit would skyrocket after 2020.
The bill would increase the budget deficit by $1 trillion from 2020 to 2029 — up from a $39 billion increase from 2010 through 2019, according to the Peterson Foundation study, conducted by the nonpartisan Lewin Group.
The group estimates the U.S. already has $56.4 trillion in unfunded obligations and promises over the long term and said “adding new benefit promises without adequate sources of financing will further threaten the nation’s long-term financial stability.”
Much of Mr. Obama’s speech to Congress will focus on the argument that the public option would be, as the president has said before, “self-sustaining.”
“There’s nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace, as long as … it’s not set up where the government is basically being subsidized by the taxpayers, so that even if they’re not providing a good deal, we keep on having to pony out more and more money,” Mr. Obama said Aug. 11 in Portsmouth, N.H.
But Mr. Obama said Wednesday that he is frustrated with Republicans and conservatives, arguing that the pragmatic, nonpartisan voices on the right have been “shouted down.”
“I hope that the Republican party can rediscover that voice,” he said. “I think they’ll find they have a partner in the White House on a whole range of issues.”
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