With tempers flaring, President Barack Obama and congressional
Republicans clashed in an extraordinary live-on-TV summit Thursday over the right prescription for the nation’s broken health care system, talking of agreement but holding to long-entrenched positions that leave them far apart.
“We have a very difficult gap to bridge here,” said Rep. Eric
Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “We just can’t afford this. That’s the ultimate problem.”
With Cantor sitting in front of a giant stack of nearly 2,400 pages representing the Democrats’ Senate-passed bill, Obama said cost is a legitimate question, but he took Cantor and other Republicans to task for using political shorthand and props “that prevent us from having a conversation.”
And so it went, hour after hour at Blair House, just across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House a marathon policy debate available from start to finish to a divided public.
The more than six-hour back-and-forth was essentially a condensed, one-day version of the entire past year of debate over the nation’s health care crisis, with all its heat, complexity and detail, and a crash course in the partisan divide, in which Democrats seek the kind of broad remake that has eluded leaders for half a century and Republicans favor much more modest changes. With Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, they were left with the critical decision about where to go next.
Obama and his Democratic allies argued at Thursday’s meeting that a broad overhaul is imperative for the nation’s future economic vitality. The president cast health care as “one of the biggest drags on our economy,” tying his top domestic priority to an issue that’s even more pressing to many Americans.
“This is the last chance, as far as I’m concerned,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.).
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