Obama: Foot-draggers Want Special Interests to Kill Health Reform

President Obama went after health reform opponents in an aggressive little speech in the Rose Garden Tuesday. He said there is consensus on many facets of reform and foot-draggers just want it to die.

Obama is pushing for the House and Senate to pass their versions of reform before their August vacations. That would reduce the chances of incomplete bills being used as target practice, and lawmakers losing their nerve. "I understand that some will try to delay action until the special interests can kill it," Obama said, "while others will simply focus on scoring political points."

He didn't name names but here are a few. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has talked of trying to "break" Obama by making health reform his Waterloo. Strategist Bill Kristol says of health reform, "kill it and start over." GOP chairman Michael Steele and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell say the process is being rushed, and Obama needs to slow down.

The process actually seems pretty slow to some of us who covered the Clintons' attempts to fix the health care system in 1993-94. It must seem even slower to people who were around when Harry Truman proposed a national insurance plan in 1945.

Let's just say that it's hard to imagine too many spanking new ideas floating around Capitol Hill at this point. Staff experts in both chambers, as well as experts from think tanks and interest groups from right to left, have been working on this problem for an eternity.

This is a point Obama and his aides are starting to make. "The road that we have traveled doesn't just stretch back through the six months of my administration," he said. "It stretches back year after year, decade after decade, through all the times that Washington has failed to tackle this problem."

Kristol says "Obamacare is on the ropes." Obama asserted the opposite. "We are closer than ever before to the reform that the American people need, and we're going to get the job done," he said.

He bolstered his case, and possibly the cause of health reform to the public, with a very clear summary of the "substantial common ground" in all three bills moving through Congress. To summarize his summary:

You can't be denied coverage if you have a pre-existing condition. You won't lose insurance if you change jobs, lose your job, start a business or get sick. You'll be able to comparison shop for private plans and you'll get an additional choice of a new public plan. You'll be protected from "financial catastrophe" by out-of-pocket limits.

Conspicuously missing from his list was agreement on how to pay for all of it, nor did the president discuss the difficulties of securing 60 Senate votes for a public insurance option. But if enough people hear what Obama and Congress have in mind and like it, those obstacles may become a lot easier to surmount.