Republicans Urge Democrats To Start All Over On Health Care

Republicans Urge Democrats To Start All Over On Health Care

As senior Democrats struggled to rescue their health-care legislation, Republicans urged President Obama and congressional leaders to give up on the unpopular bill and launch bipartisan talks on a new consensus approach.

Ever since Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority with the Massachusetts special election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) have explored using special budget rules to fix the Senate version of the bill before passing it through the House.

It’s a highly unusual and risky manuever, albeit the most direct route Obama’s desk, and Pelosi and Reid already have run into numerous internal problems as they search for Democratic votes. Liberals want to strip out the primary source of funding in the Senate bill — an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans — and are pressing to add a public insurance option. Yet Democratic moderates are reluctant to take another partisan vote on health care, whatever the bill’s contents.

Now Reid and Pelosi also must contend with GOP leaders, newly emboldened by their surprise Senate victory, who have latched onto the private talks as the latest example of Democratic strong-arm tactics to push through a bill that polls show Americans view with great skepticism.

“We’ve seen all week Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid continuing to scheme and plot trying to find some way to get their big government takeover of health care enacted,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Republicans are going to continue to be vigilant in exposing this.”

Even after Massachusetts, Boehner continued, “They are still trying to find a way to shove this down the throats of the American people.”

Despite the GOP’s near-lockstep opposition to Democratic health-care efforts over the past year, Boehner insisted that he wasn’t urging his Democratic colleagues to walk away from the cause. “Let’s start over on common sense steps that we can take to make our system work better,” the Ohio Republican said. “No one in Washington thinks our current health care system is perfect and certainly not Republicans.”

In an interview Sunday morning on the ABC News program “This Week,” Sen.-elect Scott Brown urged Reid and Pelosi to heed the concerns he heard directly from Massachusetts voters on the campaign trail, who told him they are “upset by the backroom deals,” including a special Medicaid provision for Nebraska included in the Senate bill to win the support of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

“Go back to the drawing board and do it in a transparent, bipartisan manner,” Brown asserted.

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod told the NBC show “Meet the Press” that Obama would continue to push for a health-care overhaul, as part of an effort to address root causes of the current economic crisis.

“The president is determined that we deal with the problems in front of us and health care is one of those problems,” Axelrod said. “The American people aren’t saying let’s walk away from health insurance reform.”

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, appearing on the CNN program “State of the Union,” refused to concede even that prospects for completing a bill had greatly dimmed. “We are still inside the five-yard line,” Gibbs said. “We’re one vote away in the House of Representatives from making…health care reform a reality.”

House and Senate leaders are aiming to determine by the end of the week whether passing the Senate bill is a viable option.

“We’re still looking at a way to do comprehensive legislation,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of House Democratic leadership, told Fox News. “Certainly, certain provisions have to be dropped out. The Nebraska deal and other portions of that — even Senator Nelson has said he doesn’t want that in the bill. So there are certainly changes that need to be made.”