Republicans have to work with the Democrats to fix the health finance system, or the system will continue to fall apart, President Obama told reporters Tuesday.
Obama spoke at a press briefing about efforts to revive health reform negotiations. He recalled that, during the health bill debates in Congress, Republicans had accused him of pushing for a government takeover of health care.
"I don't know if anybody noticed that for the first time this year you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector," Obama said, according to a briefing transcript. "Not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are losing their health care from their employers. It's becoming unaffordable."
Americans should be able to get health coverage from their employers, but that can happen only if small businesses can afford to provide coverage at an affordable rate, Obama said.
Reforming the health finance system also is essential to controlling federal spending, Obama said.
"Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending," Obama said. "We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that."
Obama is hoping to bring Republicans and Democrats together for a new round of health bill talks Feb. 25.
Obama says he will ask the following questions about any health finance proposals:
- Does it bring down costs for all Americans as well as for the federal government, which spends a huge amount on health care?
- Does it provide adequate protection against abuses by the insurance industry?
- Does it make coverage affordable and available to the tens of millions of working Americans who don't have it right now?
- Does it help us get on a path of fiscal sustainability?
"I'm going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals," Obama said.
But Obama said he does not want to see another 9 months of congressional committee hearings and posturing.
"Let's get the relevant parties together," Obama said. "Let's put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don't get every single thing that I want."
Obama criticized Republican congressional leaders' approach to health bill discussions.
"Bipartisanship can't be that I agree to all the things that they believe in or want, and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want, and that's the price of bipartisanship," Obama said.
Obama also questioned the argument that uncertainty about the health bills has played a major role in undermining business managers' confidence and slowing hiring.
"I think that the biggest uncertainty has been we just went through the worst recession since the Great Depression and people weren't sure whether the financial system was going to melt down and whether we were going to tip into a endless recession," Obama said.
Small businesses' inability to get credit and the partisan bickering itself also are contributing to uncertainty, Obama said.
"The sooner the business community has a sense that we've got our act together here in Washington and can move forward on big, serious issues in a substantive way, without a lot of posturing and partisan wrangling, I think the better off the entire country is going to be," Obama said.
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