Central to his campaign and his budget is Barack Obama's push for real and effective comprehensive health care reform. The policies in Obama's budget are even now on the floor of congress. Sadly, these policies are facing serious opposition, which may stop Health Care reform dead in its tracks.
According to the N. Y. Times:
The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion.
The unwillingness to embrace some of the major White House tax and revenue proposals has frustrated administration officials. They note that lawmakers, many of them supporters of the president’s ambitious agenda, clamor to hold down the deficit while balking at the proposals to finance his program.
This is already bad enough, as refusing to address global warming is serious in itself, but the problems are even worse where Health care is concerned. The N. Y. Times continues:
As Congress prepares to reconvene after a recess, senior lawmakers and aides say they are only now beginning to confront the lack of new sources of money, especially for moving the nation toward universal health coverage, a goal for which Democrats hope to deliver a plan this year.
“It is a challenge,” said the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota. For the health care effort, “you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars under any formulation.”
Among other setbacks for the White House, 10 Senate Democrats joined Republicans this month in pushing to protect more wealthy American families from the reach of the federal estate tax, a change that could cost the Treasury $100 billion over 10 years. Businesses and their Congressional allies are coming together to try to fend off an effort to close corporate tax loopholes.
The situation is not hopeless. The Administration and allies in congress, like Max Baucus, are fighting hard and already thinking up other ways to get the needed funding. But this is bad news. It seems it will be VERY hard to reform a health care system in extremely bad need of reform.
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