Foreign Press on Health Care Reform

[Zeno Swijtink]

With Health Vote, Obama Claims A New Place In History
Agence France-Presse (France)

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama now has a political triumph for the ages to burnish an already historic legacy, as the first president to fulfill the Democratic dream of health care for nearly every American.

Yet such is the rancor whipped up by the ferocious battle over the health reform bill sent to the president's desk by Congress on Sunday, the impact on Obama's political prospects and those of his Democratic allies is unclear.

Obama claimed a unique place in US history when his 2008 election win gave the United States its first black president.

Now, his victory on health reform, confirmed after a landmark House of Representatives vote on the most extensive social legislation in decades, has crowned a century-long, and oft-thwarted Democratic political crusade.

Supporters will make a case that Obama is the most significant reforming Democratic president since at least Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through health care for the poor and seniors and civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Sunday's victory boosted a presidency launched with stratospheric expectations, but which had recently looked beleaguered, and allows Obama to argue he has delivered the change he promised.

"This is what change looks like," a tired, but triumphant Obama said in late-night remarks in the White House after the vote.

"Tonight we answered the call of history as so many Americans have before us ... we did not fear our future, we shaped it."

Some liberals say the bill does not go far enough, some conservatives brand it a job killing-government takeover over a huge slice of the economy, but no one disputes the significance of the legislation.

"I think we will look back on this being an historic vote," said Dan Shea, a professor of political science at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania.

"It will change the relationship between citizen and government, and the role of government in medicine," Shea said, of a bill which expands coverage to 32 million who lack medical care and regulates the mighty insurance industry. Related article: What's at stake in health care bill

Obama may reach the high point of his presidency when he signs the health care bill, still to be adapted by a later Senate vote, into law this week.

"Barring some major happening, I think this will likely be the most important moment of his first term, and even his presidency," said Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University.

Obama swept to power vowing to enact extensive political and social reforms, during the deepest economic crisis in generations, but was slowed by Republican obstruction and his own dwindling poll numbers.

So his health care win will enhance his authority within Washington and beyond, and after refusing to give up the battle, he now looks like a dogged reformer.

It may also boost his image abroad, where some observers had begun to wonder about the toughness of a president who can boast a Nobel peace prize but still awaits his first major foreign policy achievement.

The draft law, passed after Obama threw himself into the fray, after earlier being criticized for being too hands-off, will send shockwaves through the political establishment. Related article: Battle for US health care reform

Some observers wonder whether there will be a price to pay and Sunday's vote marks the start of a new battle, to define the legislation.

The health care fight has left America even more polarized than when Obama took office in January 2009 and also spawned a vocal conservative "Tea Party" movement.

Even the idea of health care reform, is now highly unpopular, after months of Republican attacks, legislative stalling, and political bile.

The White House argues that once the furor abates, Americans will embrace reform.

But conservatives hope Americans turn against the bill and strip away Democratic majorities in Congress at risk in November.

"This vote, and the passage of this legislation is not the end of the health care reform debate," said Panagopoulos.

"Going into the 2010 mid-term elections, this will be the number one issue."

Republicans brand the reform as a pernicious government takeover of the mostly-private US health care system.

Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Florida, took up that theme within minutes of the House vote Sunday.

"This health care bill embodies all the things Americans have come to despise about our political system: more spending, more regulation, backroom deals, secrecy, misinformation, flip-flops, politics over principles, demagoguery, pandering and broken promises," Rubio said.

But the bill -- though it fell short of a state health system many Obama supporters wanted -- may also fire up the Democratic voting base.


Obama Plans To Sign Health Bill Tuesday, Faces Challenges
Xinhua (China)

WASHINGTON -- White House said Monday President Barack Obama plans to sign the just passed health bill on Tuesday, and every Congressional supporter of the bill is invited to the ceremony.

White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a regular briefing that the signing ceremony of the historic bill is "likely to be sometime tomorrow (Tuesday)."

"Each and every member of the House and Senate that supported health care reform will be invited. I expect that many of them will attend," he said.

The ceremony was originally planned in the White House south lawn, but the event is to be held in Department of Interior because of rainy weather.

The House of Representatives on Sunday night passed the Senate version of the health insurance reform bill and a "fix-it" bill, which contains contents the House would like to change in the Senate bill. The Senate bill, which cleared both chambers, can be signed into law, while the "fix-it" bill is to be taken up by the Senate on Tuesday. The procedure is called reconciliation. The Democrats adopt this procedure to conclude their year-long battle on health reform to avoid a Republican filibuster in the upper chamber.

After signing, the bill, which is the centerpiece of Obama's reform, becomes law, no matter what happens in the Senate to the " fix-it" bill.

As Democrats plan their celebration of a major victory on health care, Republicans around the country are determined to fight back. A dozen Republican State Attorneys General around the country have said they plan to sue, if Obama signs the bill.

Among them, eleven Attorneys General from states such as Florida, Nebraska and Texas are to sue together on the ground that the reform infringes on state power. Virginia's Attorney General plans to challenge the bill's provisions about forcing people to buy insurance.

Faced with Republican anger, the White House announced Obama is to travel to Iowa Thursday to discuss the reform with locals. Gibbs said he is to "talk about tangibly what people will see," since the bill has passed.


US Health Care -- Good For America, A Burden For the World?
GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ - Der Spiegel (Germany)


Obama's historic health care package is the most important reform America has seen in decades, and it will ensure that 95 percent of Americans get access to coverage. But what is good for the US may not be positive for the president himself -- nor for the rest of the world. The new law will dominate discussion in the run-up to mid-term elections, and pressing global issues will be neglected.

Germany's Iron Chancellor, as Otto von Bismarck is known, was never a huge fan of democracy. Bismarck led the country from 1871 to 1890 -- and preferred to keep the process of governing away from the public eye. Lawmaking, he once pointed out, was not all that different from what a butcher does. "The less people know about how sausages and laws are made," he famously said, "the better they will sleep."

US President Barack Obama has a significantly different view of democracy than Bismarck did, but the German's observation remains valid. For more than a year, Obama watched his healthcare reform churn through the law-making grinder. His political opponents sliced piece after piece from his most important domestic political project -- Obama himself even grabbed the knife occasionally. The public show was such that American voters slowly lost faith in the president's health care reform plan. On Sunday evening, it finally made it through the House of Representatives. Obama's apron, though, is splattered with blood.

There is little doubt that the reform package, which guarantees health care coverage for 95 percent of Americans, is one for the history books. It was a scandal that the world's richest country for so long offered its citizens such pitiful protection against illness or injury. It seems entirely possible that, in 10 years time, Americans will find it hard to believe that they didn't always have the right to health insurance. In the long fight for the reform project's eventual passage, Obama showed himself to be persistent and pugnacious. The accusation that Obama has accomplished nothing vanished in a single House vote.

The First Promise Has Been Fulfilled

Nevertheless, he cannot really celebrate the reform that he promised for so long. Since his campaign, Obama has provided two primary justifications for universal health care. First, was the moral necessity to eliminate the existential risks posed by illness or injury to more than 40 million Americans without coverage. The second justification was an economic one -- rising health care costs, so goes the argument, must be brought under control in order to reduce stress on the US budget.

The first promise has been fulfilled -- the new legislation demonstrates solidarity with those unable to afford health coverage and with those who were refused insurance. The second promise, however, has been postponed. The reform bill only half-heartedly addresses the reduction of health care costs and those measures aimed at savings can easily be skirted. Insurance companies will get millions of new customers, but no real competition. Their shares are currently skyrocketing -- they are the true winners of US health care reform.

The president, in other words, won the moral debate, but he is paying a high price. The bid to introduce social reforms of the 1960s, providing health insurance to the poor and elderly, was also deeply controversial. And back then the Republicans also made huge efforts to block the reforms. Congress, though, passed the bill with a clear majority in the end, with votes from both parties. This time Obama has failed to get a single Republican to back his health care reform and polls show that there is a deep public mistrust.

Obama's show of strength, in fact, most closely resembles the fight for greater civil rights for African-Americans in the South during the 1960s. Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act because he believed it was the right thing to do. But he did it in the clear knowledge that the Democrats would have to pay a heavy political price.

Concerned about Re-election

Obama has made it clear that he too is less concerned about the political consequences than about doing the right thing. "We rose above the weight of our politics," he said after the bill was passed. "When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenges. We overcame them. We did not avoid our responsibilities, we embraced it. We did not fear our future, we shaped it."

However, many Democrats are deeply concerned about their prospects for re-election and have only hesitantly followed their president. It is difficult to say whether mid-term elections in November will bring punishment or reward for passing the reform. One thing, however, seems clear: the debate over health care is far from over.

Even during the vote in the House of Representatives on Sunday, the Republicans were trying out what will likely become their new campaign message. Who will be forced to pay for the $940 billion reform? Can America afford it now? Can America afford it at all?

Obama counters by saying that the reform will pay for itself, indeed, he claims, it will ultimately save money. Nonetheless the billions of dollars he is currently juggling seem to be making many Americans feel faint.

Further Successes Doubtful

The debate will dominate the next few months -- and will no doubt also have an impact on the other projects that Obama is finally planning to tackle. The attention that the president will have to continue to pay to health care, in fact, makes further successes that much more doubtful.

Every other issue has become a sideshow, particularly those outside the borders of America. The Afghanistan mission: of marginal interest. Protecting the environment: postponed. Peace in the Middle East: off in the distance. Sanctions against Iran: delayed. Europe: not even worth a trip.

The one remaining global superpower has succumbed to navel gazing. The nature of Obama's hard-fought victory means little will change in the near future. On the contrary: Now he must explain to the country and to his own party why the entire health care journey, as all-encompassing as it turned out to be, was worth it in the end. He will have little time for anything else.

Such a realization should not spoil the celebration over health care for the Americans themselves. But the rest of the world won't be joining the party quite so enthusiastically.


United States: Health Of A Nation
The Guardian (U.K.)

Here's one from the U.K..

We live in an age that is quicker to claim that history has been made than it is to try to understand the present. However, a piece of history was made on Sunday night, and yesterday Republicans were scrambling to come to terms with it. It is not just that the United States finally has healthcare legislation that will ensure near-universal coverage (although it will take until 2019 to acquire it). America yesterday also woke up to the comparatively new spectacle of a Democratic president who can get things done. Not a Jimmy Carter, who failed, or a Bill Clinton, who dodged and wove his way through office, but a Barack Obama, who can straightforwardly claim to have delivered the major promise of his manifesto. Not many leaders can claim that after one year in office.

It has been a gruelling year, in which the Obama presidency all but foundered before it had really begun. This has also been a sharp learning curve for the man drawn instinctively to the centre ground, only to realise late in the day that the turf he was standing on was boggy and that he was sinking into it. Over the past week, he and his much-criticised enforcer, Rahm Emanuel, have fought on multiple fronts 䴋 even in the House of the Representatives' gym 䴋 to keep their party together. Even so, 34 Democrats voted against the motion. The legislation falls far short of the ideal: it has no public option 䴋 cheaper insurance plans offered by the federal government 䴋 and the executive order assuring that no federal funds would be used to subsidise abortion may have secured the support of a handful of Catholic Democrats, but it would have appalled the rest. But after the compromises he has offered, the carrots he has dangled, the threats he has made, no one can accuse Mr Obama of standing aloof from the ugly fray or being a greenhorn in the dark arts of gaining votes on Capitol Hill. After a fight like this, he has acquired the status of a combat veteran, as hardened as his secretary of state, with whom he was once unfavourably compared.

For Republicans, who took a strategic decision to oppose healthcare reform no matter what it did, this episode has been a disaster and could postpone by at least one presidential term the day when they are deemed fit for office. David Frum, George Bush's speechwriter, to whom the axis of evil phrase is attributed, calls the battle they have just lost their Waterloo. Republican moderates were repeatedly offered a chance to shape the healthcare plan, which would surely not have been as alien to them as they claimed. A plan similar to the Senate bill was passed in Massachusetts when the Republican Mitt Romney was governor. By eschewing all contact with Mr Obama's satanic verses, they have abandoned a large swath of political ground. They don't know it yet but mainstream conservatives, appalled at the chants of a crowd of Tea Party activists on Capitol Hill, surely do.

What happens next comes down to a cold calculation. Will popular opposition to the reforms swell as people discover that their Medicare taxes are going up, or will they claim ownership of a reform that means they can no longer be rejected for insurance because of pre-existing medical conditions and that their children can be kept on their plans longer? Mr Obama has history on his side. No one today is talking about eliminating Medicare, which was denounced in much the same terms when it was passed in 1965, because, far from becoming, in Ronald Reagan's famous words, the end of American freedom, it has instead become part of the American landscape. Mr Obama is banking on a similar fate for his reforms and, if he is right, it means that the Republicans are losing a battle based on the politics of fear. They will take a long time to recover a positive message they can sell to the people. Mr Obama will have to get the message out across the country between now and the midterm elections in November. But he will do so as a changed man and a more assured political fighter.

[SandBar]

THanks for such a great and inclusive coverage. Now if only the unpublicans would get it together and move away from being the party of no know to caring about the people in this country. This is both a big step and a small step for health care, at least we're stepping forward, as the world has expressed.

With Health Vote, Obama Claims A New Place In History
Agence France-Presse (France)

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama now has a political triumph for the ages to burnish an already historic legacy, as the first president to fulfill the Democratic dream of health care for nearly every American.

Yet such is the rancor whipped up by the ferocious battle over the health reform bill sent to the president's desk by Congress on Sunday, the impact on Obama's political prospects and those of his Democratic allies is unclear.

...


United States: Health Of A Nation
The Guardian (U.K.)

Here's one from the U.K..

We live in an age that is quicker to claim that history has been made than it is to try to understand the present. However, a piece of history was made on Sunday night, and yesterday Republicans were scrambling to come to terms with it. It is not just that the United States finally has healthcare legislation that will ensure near-universal coverage (although it will take until 2019 to acquire it). America yesterday also woke up to the comparatively new spectacle of a Democratic president who can get things done. Not a Jimmy Carter, who failed, or a Bill Clinton, who dodged and wove his way through office, but a Barack Obama, who can straightforwardly claim to have delivered the major promise of his manifesto. Not many leaders can claim that after one year in office.

....