Health care debate a long-running story

Health care debate a long-running story
Dating back to Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Updated: Wednesday, 12 Aug 2009, 7:34 AM EDT
Published : Wednesday, 12 Aug 2009, 7:33 AM EDT

WALTER R. MEARS,AP Special Correspondent
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) - President Barack Obama's campaign for a health care overhaul is an intense installment in a long-running story, dating to Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

It did not go well nearly a century ago. Roosevelt made national health insurance an issue in his last, losing campaign for the White House, and successive efforts to get it enacted have lost, too.


The basic issue, affordable health care for all Americans, has not changed. But possible solutions have not evolved either, in part because new proposals seldom build on old ones. Obama's broad, leave-the-details-to-Congress proposal has little in common with the 1,300-page measure President Bill Clinton couldn't even get to a vote in a Democratic Senate in 1993.

The Obama strategy was designed to avoid mistakes Clinton made in confronting Congress with a massive bill written in the White House under the management of Hillary Rodham Clinton and essentially telling the House and Senate to take it or leave it. Clinton threatened to veto any bill that did not deliver universal health care. He got nothing to veto.

The Obama team missed part of the lesson when the president pressed for passage of House and Senate bills before Congress took its summer vacation so that they could negotiate a final version when they reconvene in September. What he got was narrow committee approval in the House, a preface to debate and action after Labor Day. In the Senate, the Finance Committee was trying to meet a Sept. 15 deadline to deliver its bill.

Obama's push for action before the summer recess created a goal the Democrats couldn't meet and a psychological setback he didn't need to risk. He now says that it was no big deal and that what he wants is a reform law by the end of the year, to get all Americans insured and curb medical costs.

That is a big deal, underscored by his aggressive television and traveling campaign to try to build public support — and pressure in Congress — to enact health care overhaul this time.

"Now is the hard part — because the history is clear — every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got," Obama told a town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday. "They use their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always do."