Georgia Lawmakers Discuss Obama Health-Care Plan

By HALIMAH ABDULLAH - McClatchy Newspapers
The Macon Telegraph
February 23, 2010

Washington — Georgia’s largely Republican congressional delegation is unimpressed with President Obama’s attempts to resuscitate his ailing health-care reform agenda by using as a blueprint hotly contested proposals that narrowly passed in the House and Senate last year.

“In order to move forward on health care, the White House must ensure that the Democratic health-care bills currently in the House and Senate will not be the basis for moving forward. It’s clear that’s not the case,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee and opposes Democrat-backed Senate health-care reform measures. “There are ways to find common ground, but recycling legislation the American people have already rejected is not the way to go about it.”

Obama’s newly released plan to expand health care to the uninsured calls for $950 billion during the next decade to help states weather the cost of expanding Medicaid over four years, ends discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions and aims to reduce the deficit by about $100 billion over 10 years.

Obama generally took parts of the Senate and House measures, which passed on partisan lines, cut the “public option” of government-run insurance plan beloved by liberals and spurned by moderates and conservatives and scaled back the tax on high-end policies derided by labor unions. Under the Obama plan, most Americans would have to get health-care coverage, or face penalties, and there would be federal help for lower-income families who struggle to afford premiums.

New to the debate is an Obama proposal to involve the federal government in overseeing health insurance premiums, traditionally a state function. Obama proposes that federal and state authorities work together and “if a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide rebates or take other actions to make premiums affordable.”

Taxes and regulation likely will prove the biggest flash points for Republican members of the Georgia delegation, the broader GOP and some moderate Democrats.

“I’m sure the average American is just as confused as I am about why President Obama is rolling out this backroom deal days before he’s supposed to have a bipartisan health-care summit,” said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Grantville. “The Democrats are still peddling the same left-wing, tax-raising, job-killing big government takeover of health care that Americans have soundly rejected.”

It is highly uncertain whether the plan, or a televised bipartisan summit Thursday to discuss health-care legislation, will launch a new bipartisan effort to get a bill passed, as Republicans reacted bitterly to the nearly $1 trillion proposal. “Republicans will continue to offer the kind of step-by-step reforms to lower costs that our constituents have been asking for in the hundreds of town halls and constituent meetings we have had across the country,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Obama’s last-ditch effort to revive health-care legislation faces difficult, perhaps insurmountable obstacles, but it at least ends his year-old reluctance to immerse himself in the messy details of crafting legislation.

“Democrats will have more comfort now in getting behind a plan,’ said Len Nichols, director of the New America Foundation’s health policy program.

Moderate Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Macon, said Monday that he is still studying the proposal’s finer points.

Reopening bipartisan talks only makes sense if it’s a cynical political effort to put the Republicans on the spot, said Linda Fowler, a political scientist at Dartmouth University. Georgia Republicans expressed similar skepticism.

“It is my hope that the president and Democrats will make a sincere effort to accept ideas offered by Republicans,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., “But the idea of holding a bipartisan health-care summit meant to produce bipartisan compromise four days after the president’s health-care plan is unveiled makes me less than confident.”

McClatchy Newspapers reporters David Lightman and Steven Thomma contributed to this report.

http://www.macon.com/2010/02/23/1034006/ga-lawmakers-discuss-obama-health.html

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