Congressional committees have moved health care reform bills forward while keeping in mind a looming deadline of finalizing health system reform by its annual August recess. On Monday, with a deadline just weeks away, President Barack Obama slightly backed away from urgent calls of reform "cannot wait" and asking Democratic and Republican lawmakers to "seize this opportunity."
Obama told the Newshour with Jim Lehrer while progress is being made toward meeting the August deadline, it is okay if a health reform bill is not signed, sealed and delivered to his desk before Congress goes on its summer holiday. Here are excerpts from a transcript of the interview:
MR. LEHRER: You still believe the House and Senate will pass something by the August recess, which is barely three weeks away?
PRES. OBAMA: I am - I think this is actually a good example of where the focus tends to be on what we haven't gotten done yet rather than what we've done. We have three out of the five committees that have jurisdiction over this thing have already passed a bill. We've got support from the [AMA] - so the nation's doctors have said we are supportive of the president's approach.
We have the nurses - so the people who know health care best have said we're supportive. We've got the hospitals saying we're supportive. We've got AARP, the organization of retirees, saying we're supportive. And so we actually have made, I think, extraordinary progress. Now, we've got this last little bit to go and that includes some very tough questions: primarily, how do you pay on the front end for coverage of the people who don't currently have it? Because what I've said is I'm not going to add to the deficit. We've got to pay for whatever we're doing.
And how are we going to then make sure that we're controlling health-care inflation on the back end? Those two questions are tough, difficult questions, but that's why presumably these folks got elected - that's certainly why I got elected - to solve these hard problems.
MR. LEHRER: As you know, a lot of the commentary over the weekend was, it's not just going to happen - getting from here to the final hurdle here - unless you really start cracking some heads and really say, hey, this is the Obama plan, this is what I want. So much for what this committee wants, here's what I want and I am going to push and go. Are you ready to do that?
PRES. OBAMA: You know, the interesting thing is we've actually been very clear on what we want. I've said that I want to make sure that if you have health care you're going to keep it. I've said that we've got to reform the insurance industry so people aren't being excluded for pre-existing conditions, that it's not easy for insurance companies to dump people when they change jobs or if they lose their job. I've been very clear about the fact that it has to be paid for. I've been very clear about the fact that we should have a public plan.
So we've laid a whole bunch of markers out there. And this week, as members of Congress have worked their way through this process and examined what all the options are, what we're going to be doing is bringing some of them into the White House and -
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MR. LEHRER: But do I read you correctly that you're backing off the August deadline, kind of thing - that you wanted this passed by the August session?
MR. OBAMA: Here, I think, is a fair assessment, Jim: I want this done now. Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town. You've been around here long enough to know that you have to say, get this done. If somebody comes to me and says, it's basically done; it's going to spill over by a few days or a week - you know, that's different. If people say, as, for example, a Republican senator said over the weekend, that we just want to keep on delaying and delaying this thing because we think this is going to be Obama's Waterloo -