ABCNews: Obama Fast-Tracks Health Care Reform

Even as the President Urges Senate Democrats to Move Quickly, a Congressional Budget Office Ruling Lowers a Hurdle that Tripped Up the Clinton-Era Reform Effort

By GAIL RUSSELL CHADDOCK
Staff Writer, Christian Science Monitor
June 6, 2009
ABCNews

President Obama, with a strong assist from Congress's budget watchdog, is moving healthcare reform to the fast track on Capitol Hill -- with or without Republican support.


President Barack Obama is forging ahead with healthcare reform. But will he have the support of Republicans as well as Democrats?

The next two months are a "make or break period" for getting healthcare done, the president told Senate Democrats at a White House meeting on Tuesday. Mr. Obama says he still wants a bipartisan plan, but Republicans worry that Tuesday's Democrats-only meeting signals a new tack that may leave them behind.

Call it un-HillaryCare. The president's rush to closure, even before details of the plan are in place, is in sharp contrast to the White House-driven healthcare reform effort in the first two years of the Clinton administration.

Obama is leaving the drafting of the plan largely to Congress, where competing plans are emerging on both sides of the aisle this week. Meanwhile, the White House is making the overall case for reform and generating a sense of inevitability that a plan will clear Congress this year.

At the same time, some elements that sunk the Clinton-era healthcare plan appear less of a factor this time.

In a little-noted but significant development last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which played a key role in derailing support for the Clinton plan, unveiled the approach it will take in judging the cost of Obama's healthcare reform.

"This is a political land mine. The CBO ruling, which went pretty much under the radar, is very important in making sure that healthcare reform can be successful," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington.

The critical element in CBO scoring is what counts as a part of the federal budget. In 1994, the CBO described President Clinton's proposed health alliances as government activities financed by government funds -- a move that supporters say derailed the plan by assigning it unacceptably high costs.

Typically, the CBO scores legislation only after it has been finalized. But in a May 27 issue brief, the CBO took a proactive stance on budgetary treatment of proposals to change the nation's health insurance system. A federal mandate requiring individuals to have a minimum amount of health insurance would not be counted as a government expense "because the federal government imposes a variety of mandates on private entities whose associated costs are not included in the budget," said CBO director Douglas Elmendorf in a blog explaining the brief.

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