President may need firmer hand to grasp success on health care

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is seeing the downside of his light touch on revamping the nation’s health-care system.

Congressional Democrats are off to a halting start, blindsided by a high cost estimate and divided over how to proceed. The confusion has emboldened Republican critics of the administration’s approach to its top domestic priority.

While too early to rule out eventual success, it seems Obama will have to be more forceful and hands-on.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who once was Obama’s choice for shepherding the plan through Congress, said the chance that the legislation will pass is no better than 50-50. Those are fairly good odds, he said, for such complicated proposals that stir deep passions.

Joel Johnson, a former Clinton White House aide who lobbies for health-care companies, was more optimistic. “This is probably right where it’s supposed to be,” he said.

“It’s still a hard slog,” Johnson said. “It will have some near-death experiences” along the way, which is typical for far-reaching, complex legislation, he said.

Obama has given Congress leeway, trying to avoid the heavy-handed approach that helped doom a similar effort by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Obama recently told a Wisconsin crowd that he would not run roughshod over lawmakers with a “my way or the highway” approach.

But the lack of firm guidance from the president may have contributed to an unsteady launch by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The committee rolled out an incomplete bill in an effort to get action started and to show Republicans that Democrats had not made up their minds on every issue.

The strategy seemed to backfire when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the plan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years but cover only about one-third of those now lacking health insurance.

Democrats protested that the estimate overlooked important money-savers to be added later. But Republicans seized on the costly projection and the bill’s half-finished nature, throwing Democratic leaders on the defensive.

Competing plans abound in Congress, complicating Obama’s task even though his party holds solid House and Senate majorities.

House Democrats presented 850 pages of draft legislation Friday that includes many of the president’s priorities. It would cover nearly all the nation’s nearly 50 million uninsured. It calls for a public health insurance plan to compete with private insurers, something that most congressional Republicans and some Democrats oppose.

Officials said late Friday the White House, lawmakers and the pharmaceutical industry are negotiating a possible deal to have drug companies pay for narrowing a gap in coverage in the prescription drug program for Medicare.