The healthcare reform debate brewing in the U.S. Senate may cause dyspepsia for some special interests.
    
But the mere prospect of reform could be making the American public feel better already — about health coverage, at least. That’s according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropic organization devoted to health and healthcare issues.
    
The foundation’s consumer confidence index for healthcare climbed to a new high of 104.4 points in October, as the debate gathered pace in the Senate and House of Representatives.
    
Why? There was a big jump in people’s confidence about future access to care and coverage. Fewer worried about losing their insurance and concerns about future affordability dropped, too.
    
“During a month when there was considerable momentum around health reform, including the passage of a reform bill by the Senate Finance Committee, the American public appears to be more confident about the future,” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation president and CEO, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey said.
    
“Americans of every ideology know that our health care system needs to be fixed and want some type of reform,” she added.
    
That last remark — “some type of reform” — could prove prophetic.
    
Republicans seem to think reform is a terrible idea and appear to be in lock-step opposition to it.
    
That leaves it to Democrats and allied independents to forge a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority to push legislation through. Despite sharp differences within their already frayed coalition, Democratic leaders appear to be betting that the whole bunch, in the end, will opt for “some type of reform” rather than returning home empty handed for the holidays.

Photo Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (U.S. Capitol)

Republican victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races may send shivers through Democratic circles, but what does it mean for President Barack Obama’s ambitious proposal to overhaul the $2.5 trillion healthcare system?

Not much, say Democrats. They are looking beyond the state issues that dominated the governor’s races and instead are focusing on two congressional races won by Democrats where national issues like healthcare reform were in play. 

“From my perspective we won last night,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters when asked about Tuesday’s elections. “This was a victory for healthcare reform. From my standpoint we picked up votes last night — one in California and one in New York.”

The two victories–one in New York district 23 where Bill Owens became the first Democrat to win the seat in over a century and in California district 10 where John Garamendi kept the seat vacated by Ellen Tauscher in Democratic hands — brings the number of Democrats in the House to 258.

 That gives Pelosi a little more breathing room as she tries to muster the votes needed to pass the sweeping health reform legislation.  She could lose as many as 40 Democrats when the House votes, possibly later this week, and still pass the measure.

The two new members are expected to be sworn into office on Thursday.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveils Democratic healthcare legislation)

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are gearing up for an epic battle against the sweeping healthcare reform that Democratic leaders hope to bring to the House floor for debate later this week.

“Our goal is to make this as difficult as possible to vote for it,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner. “We think this bill is the wrong prescription for what ails our healthcare system in America.”

Representative Mike Pence, who heads the House Republican Conference, said the campaign against the bill unveiled last week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began over the weekend with Republican members delivering copies of the huge 1,990-page bill to public libraries. Also, Republican women are speaking against the bill this week on the House floor.

“It is a fact that 85 percent of healthcare decisions in this country are made by American women,” Pence said.

On Thursday, House Republicans plan a special Internet town hall meeting. Pence said the discussion with participants will last at least 12 hours.

“Our members are going to stand on principle against Speaker Pelosi’s trillion dollar government takeover of our healthcare system,” Boehner said.

Republicans plan to offer a far less sweeping alternative to the Democratic bill. Boehner said it will focus on reducing the cost of health insurance.

The proposal will allow individuals and businesses to purchase insurance across state lines and to form pools to buy insurance. It will also seek to limit malpractice lawsuits, which Republicans say lead to higher healthcare costs.

The Republican bill will also encourage states to look over their own insurance laws and mandates to find ways to lower costs.

“Many states don’t realize that mandates in their own laws actually drive up the cost of health insurance,” Boehner said.

The Republican bill will not include the sweeping insurance market reforms contained in the Democratic bill, which would bar insurers from excluding people from coverage or charging more because of medical history.

Instead, the Republican bill would provide some federal money to help states create high risk insurance pools where those people could obtain coverage, Boehner said.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (House Republican Leader John Boehner plays golf with Tiger Woods.)

Senator Joe Lieberman, a former Democrat-turned-independent, is at it again — comforting Republicans and irritating Democrats.

This time Lieberman is doing it by saying, “I probably will support some Republican candidates” in next year’s congressional election –  even though he’s still a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus.

“I’m going to call them as I see them,” he said in an interview with ABC News that the network posted on its web site on Friday.

Lieberman riled Democrats last year by campaigning for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. And he upset many of them again this week by saying he would help Republicans block their proposal to create a government-backed insurance program to compete with private insurers.

When it comes to elections, Lieberman said, he backs people on both sides of the political aisle who are more interested in getting things done rather than playing politics.

“There’s a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans,” he told ABC. “There’s a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side.”

“And inbetween is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them — and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who’s not a Democrat,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman said in the hotly contested race in his home state of Connecticut, he backs incumbent Senate Democrat Chris Dodd.

Lieberman was the Democrats’ 2000 U.S. vice presidential nominee and won three terms to the Senate as a Democrat. But he narrowly won a fourth Senate term in 2006 as an independent after he lost the Democratic nomination to an anti-Iraq war challenger.

A number of Senate Democrats wanted to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee for backing McCain’s White House bid. But with the support of Democratic President Barack Obama, Lieberman managed to keep it.

There was fear if he lost the chairmanship, he would become a Republican.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Lieberman embraces Obama after president’s address to Congress Feb. 24)

President Barack Obama had a message for his political friends and foes on Monday — “just because I’m skinny doesn’t mean I’m not tough.”

After weeks in which he has been angrily criticized by some on the right, to the point of creating a poster image of him with a Hitler mustache, Obama told a Democratic fund-raising event in Miami that some of his supporters have been expressing concern to him.

“I’ve tried to explain … just because I’m skinny doesn’t mean I’m not tough. I don’t rattle. I’m not going to shrink back, because now is the time for us to continue to push and follow through on those things that we know have to be done but have not been done in decades,” he said.

Obama was in Miami raising $1.5 million for Democratic congressional candidates for the 2010 elections, in which Democrats are seeking to hold onto their strong majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

And he had tough words for those Republican critics who he says are not helping solve some of the problems that festered when they were in control of the White House and Congress.

“Lately I feel like somebody made a big mess and I’ve got my mop and I’m mopping the floor and the folks who made the mess are there (saying) ‘you’re not mopping fast enough. You’re not mopping the right way. It’s a socialist mop.’”

For more Reuters political coverage click here.

Photo credit:Reuters/Jim Young (Obama at Democratic congressional candidates fundraiser in Miami)

Americans are still sharply divided over President Barack Obama’s vision of healthcare overhaul, but they’re starting to come around  — again –  on the so-called public option, so says a new Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Monday.

Fifty-seven percent of all Americans now favor a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers while 40 percent are opposed, according to the poll.

That’s up from 52 percent support in mid-August, but still down from 62 percent in June.

What’s happened since the congressional summer recess  when anger over the prospect of a public option  heated town hall meetings across the country?

The public option (a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers) is still favored by Obama and liberal Democrats as a way to increase competition and cut rising costs.

There’s still plenty of opposition from Republicans and other critics who argue that a public option  would be a government takeover and could drive private insurance companies out of business.

In the Senate,  lawmakers are trying to craft a single healthcare bill out of two separate proposals — one with the public option and one without. All three pending House bills include a public option.

Some numbers from the Washington Post/ABC poll:
- 57 percent of Americans now favor a public insurance option, 40 percent are opposed
- 56 percent favor a provision mandating all Americans to buy insurance
- 45 percent favor the broad outlines of the proposals now moving in Congress, 48 percent are opposed
-  seven in 10 Democrats back the plan,  almost nine in 10 Republicans oppose it
- 52 percent of Independents are against proposed reforms, 42 percent are in favor

For more Reuters political coverage click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang; Reuters/Jonathan Ernst  ( Pharmacist Sonya Safaie at work in Great Falls, Virginia; /Copy of House healthcare bill HR 3200 )

By Tim Gaynor

President Barack Obama's signature battle to overhaul the United States' $2.5 trillion healthcare industry to extend coverage and lower costs for Americans has met fierce opposition from Republicans.

But a move by Democrat backers to exclude 12 million illegal immigrants from buying health coverage and restrict the participation of authorized migrants has drawn the ire of U.S. Hispanics -- a bloc that overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Obama in last year's election.

Hispanic lawmakers and activists are riled by the bill pushed in the U.S. Senate by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, which denies illegal immigrants the option to buy health insurance and places a five-year wait period on legal immigrants before they can access health benefits.

"When we effectively bar the immigrant community from buying private insurance, we force them further into the shadows of our society, and we relegate them to emergency room care ­at the highest cost to taxpayers," Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, told a conference call with reporters this week.

Obama has so far been popular with U.S. Hispanics. His backing for comprehensive immigration reform, which seeks to allow millions of illegal immigrants in good standing a chance to pay fines and become citizens, helped win him two-thirds of the Latino vote in last November's election.

But activists say the push to exclude undocumented workers from paying for healthcare -- even for their U.S. born children -- is testing support for Obama among Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the population and 9 percent of the electorate.

"The Latino vote was based on promises that a new administration would lead us out of the darkness and finally bring about immigration reform," said Lorena Colin of the Mexican American Coalition for Immigration Reform, a Chicago-based pro-immigrant grassroots group.

"Instead, we are seeing the administration allowing undocumented immigrants to become scapegoats and the targets of widespread derision and hate in the healthcare debate," she added.

Reverend Luis Cortés, Jr., meanwhile, the president of a prominent Hispanic evangelical network Esperanza said he was disillusioned with the Democrats, and warned that Hispanics voters would punish lawmakers who denied immigrants care in the midterm Congressional elections in 2010.

"All we can do at this point is look at each local election, one by one, and punish those individuals-regardless of their party-who deny rights to legal immigrants and children, as well as the poorest in our nation, the undocumented," he said.

Former President Jimmy Carter said out loud what Democrats had been whispering for a while, that the protests against the country’s first black president are tinged with racism.

Carter’s forceful words threw the issue into the forefront of public debate.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter said in an interview on NBC.

While others had raised the issue, it wasn’t until Carter’s blunt words that it reached a crescendo as loud as the protests.

Carter mentioned his southern roots in saying ”that racism inclination still exists” in the country and many white people believe African Americans are not qualified to be president.

Critics of Obama have protested at town hall meetings around the country, rallied in Washington, and even yelled out on the floor of the House of Representatives (Congressman Joe Wilson’s “you lie”).

Michael Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued a statement that said: “President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn’t about race. It is about policy.”

Steele accused Democrats of trying to shift attention away from the president’s unpopular healthcare plan.

“Characterizing Americans’ disapproval of President Obama’s policies as being based on race is an outrage and a troubling sign about the lengths Democrats will go to disparage all who disagree with them,” he said.

Obama did not respond to a shouted question by a reporter about Carter’s racism comments.

UPDATE: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says that Obama doesn’t believe the criticism is racist. “The president does not believe that it’s based on the color of his skin.”

Is there an objective barometer for whether a protest is based on racism or policy?

What do you think? Are the protests about race or policy or both?

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer (Carter at 2008 Democratic National Convention), Reuters/Molly Riley (Steele after being elected RNC chairman in January)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hit back at protesters vocally disrupting healthcare reform meetings around the country, calling them “un-American” - and with that word ignited the ire of opposition Republicans.

Pelosi and Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote in USA Today that there was an “ugly campaign” to misrepresent the healthcare overhaul legislation being written in Congress and stop public debate, which they said is “at the heart of our democracy.”

Opponents have shouted down lawmakers at town meetings held to explain the healthcare ideas, calling the proposed government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers “socialism” - a fighting word in American politics.  “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American,” the Democrats wrote.

The other side was quick to lob equally barbed words back. “Each public forum should give every participant the opportunity to express their views, but to label Americans who are expressing vocal opposition to the Democrats’ plan ‘un-American’ is outrageous and reprehensible,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner.

Congress is on break for the month of August, during which time Democrats were to try to sell healthcare reform ideas to the public.

In the first week of the summer recess, headlines have focused more on the raucous public meetings than on the healthcare legislation itself.

Has the Democratic strategy to win public support for healthcare reform backfired?

For more Reuters political news, click here.