Washington President Obama's bipartisan meeting on health care reform planned for February 25 will be broadcast live, a senior administration official said Monday.Coverage details were not complete, but the official said the White House expected "the whole thing to be live."
The half-day meeting is an attempt by the Obama administration to rescue health care legislation, a top domestic priority for the president. Televising it also would help fulfill a campaign promise by Obama that health care negotiations would be broadcast live.
On Tuesday, Obama will meet with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate for bipartisan talks that the president promised in his State of the Union address last month. Tuesday's meeting now will help prepare for the February 25 health care talks.
In a CBS interview broadcast nationally Sunday, Obama said: "What I'd like to do is have a meeting whereby I'm sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health care experts, and let's just go through these bills -- their ideas, our ideas -- let's walk through them in a methodical way so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense."
Obama first floated the idea of face-to-face, televised talks with Republicans to seek a health care compromise last week. In a speech Thursday at a fundraising crowd, he said that whatever legislation emerges from the talks should then go to Congress for a vote.
"If Congress decides we're not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, after all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not," Obama said Thursday. "That's how democracy works."
The senior administration official said Obama was determined to keep pushing for a health care bill.
Obama will not "let this moment slip away," the official said. The president "hopes to have Republican support in doing so -- but he is going to move forward on health reform."
The planned talks with Republicans are the first clear strategy by Obama and Democrats on how to proceed on health care after losing their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate.
Republican Scott Brown was sworn in as the new U.S. senator from Massachusetts last week, leaving the Democrats one vote shy of being able to overcome GOP filibusters of health care reform and other major initiatives.
The House and Senate have passed separate health care bills supported by Democrats. Obama said last week that Democratic leaders were completing work on merging the two bills into a single Democratic proposal for the talks with Republicans.
In the interview Sunday with Katie Couric of CBS News, Obama said he planned to ask Republican leaders "to put their ideas on the table."
"What I want to do is look at the Republican ideas that are out there, and I want to be very specific," Obama said. "How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance market so that people with pre-existing conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don't have health insurance can get it?
"If we can go step by step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then procedurally, there's no reason why we can't do it a lot faster than the process took last year," Obama said.
Leaders in both chambers reacted to Obama's remarks along party lines.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement that while Republicans "appreciate the opportunity to share ideas with the president," to reach a bipartisan consensus, "the White House can start by shelving the current health spending bill, and with it their goal of slashing a half trillion dollars from Medicare and raising a half trillion in new taxes."
"Setting these goals aside would be a sign that the administration and Democrats in Congress are listening to the country and are truly interested in a bipartisan approach," McConnell said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said in a statement that Senate Democrats "have promoted the pursuit of a bipartisan approach to health reform from day one.
"As we continue our work to fix our broken health care system, Senate Democrats will not relent on our commitment to protecting consumers from insurance company abuses, reducing health care costs, saving Medicare and cutting the deficit," Reid said.
On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said in a Sunday statement, "The House-passed health insurance reform legislation included a number of Republican amendments -- added as the bill worked its way through three committees. ... We remain hopeful that the Republican leadership will work in a bipartisan fashion on the great challenges the American people face."
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement that he was "pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care."
But he added, "The problem with the Democrats' health care bills is not that the American people don't understand them; the American people do understand them, and they don't like them. The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access."
Republicans say the comprehensive Democratic health care bills would lead to a government takeover of health care. They call for smaller steps focused on individual issues, such as limiting medical malpractice lawsuits.
Democrats, however, say that spiraling health care costs that threaten the nation's future economic stability can be addressed only through comprehensive reform.
Obama said Thursday that a merged Democratic bill would expand coverage to 30 million Americans who lack health insurance while reducing long-term health care costs.
It would include an insurance exchange to allow people and small-business owners to pool resources to purchase coverage, Obama said, but he made no mention of a government-run public health insurance option that Republicans have rallied against.
Obama said the Democratic bill would include reforms that prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing medical conditions or capping lifetime benefits.
"And by the way, all of it is paid for," Obama said Thursday. "Not only is it deficit-neutral, but the Congressional Budget Office, which is the bipartisan office that is the scorekeeper for [how much] things cost in Congress, says it is going to reduce the costs by $1 trillion."
Obama called health care reform the "single best way to bring down our deficits," adding that "nobody has disputed that.""Nobody can dispute the fact that if we don't tackle surging health care costs, then we can't control our budget," he said.CNN's Ed Henry, Dana Bash and Tom Cohen contributed to this report.
Read More
