Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama invited Republican and Democratic lawmakers from the House and Senate to a Feb. 25 meeting to discuss ways to get an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system through Congress.
Obama said he wants lawmakers “to put their ideas on the table.” The president spoke during a live televised interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric during the network’s Super Bowl pregame show yesterday.
At the planned half-day meeting, Obama said he wants a “large meeting with Republicans and Democrats to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.” Obama wants live television coverage of the meeting, said a White House official who asked not to be named.
Asked about starting over on the health-care debate, Obama said he wants to look at “very specific” ideas that Republicans present.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, responding to Obama’s idea, said legislation should start from scratch if Obama wants a measure that can get support from both parties.
“If we are to reach a bipartisan consensus, the White House can start by shelving the current health-spending bill,” McConnell said in an e-mailed statement. “There are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf.”
Bill Stalled
The House and Senate each passed versions of the overhaul, but the push to produce a final bill has stalled. During a speech at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting in Washington yesterday Obama told about 450 Democratic Party leaders that he won’t “walk away” from his effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.
House Republican Leader John Boehner echoed the top Senate Republican, saying that the “best way to start on real bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats “remain hopeful that the Republican leadership will work in a bipartisan fashion on the great challenges the American people face.” The House and Senate will keep working until Feb. 25 to reconcile differences in their respective health-care bills, Pelosi said in a statement.
“We have promoted the pursuit of a bipartisan approach to health reform from day one,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a statement. “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.”
‘Right Thing’
Obama told Couric that while jobs have always been a top priority for his administration, the push for health-care legislation “continues to be the right thing to do.”
Since Republican Scott Brown won a Jan. 19 special election for the Senate seat held for almost 50 years by Democrat Edward Kennedy, Obama — in his State of the Union speech and elsewhere — has called on Republicans to seek bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems.
Obama said the U.S. economy is moving toward recovery.
“We are seeing the corner turn on the economy growing again,” Obama told Couric, saying that economic growth is “not happening as fast as we’d like.” Obama said he has proposed plans to help community banks and small businesses.
The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7 percent in January, the lowest level since August. Revised figures show the U.S. has lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.
‘Concrete Improvement’
“My hope is that for folks who are unemployed, they’re going to start seeing concrete improvement in their own lives in the next few months,” he said.
The president said there has been “a lot of posturing” about the federal budget deficit, saying Democrats and Republicans need to “come together in a sensible way” to reduce debt. The “most important thing we can do” to hold down spending is to “get a health reform package passed.”
Obama said the administration hasn’t decided whether to continue plans to hold the trial for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. “If you’ve got a city that’s saying no, and a police department that’s saying no, and a mayor that’s saying no, that makes it difficult,” Obama said.
Miranda Rights
The Obama administration has come under fire from Republican lawmakers for trying terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in civilian U.S. courts, where the 23-year-old Nigerian man was provided access to a lawyer, instead of trying him in the military-justice system.
Obama said on CBS that Abdulmutallab was read his Miranda rights only after he provided Federal Bureau of Investigation agents with “actionable intelligence.” Obama said the practice of reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights should be reviewed.
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he told Republican congressional leaders on Christmas night about the interrogation of Abdulmutallab, and called subsequent criticism “a bit of an outcry after the fact.”
Brennan said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican Leader John Boehner were among senior members of Congress he briefed after Abdulmutallab was arrested on suspicion of trying to detonate explosives as Northwest Airlines Flight 253 approached Detroit carrying 279 passengers and 11 crew members.
“None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point,” Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.
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