The earth beneath their feet: Obama recasts health care reform

Reading the Obama Administration's letter setting out the terms of the Feb. 25 health care summit, it struck me that the obvious has crept up on us by inches. It's this: moving in his own deliberate fashion, President Obama has doubled down on health care reform.  Rather than gather his Democratic flock in the immediate aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, he has moved the political ground beneath them as well as the Republicans.  He has issued a put-up-or-shut-up to the whole Congress. Of course, he knows that only the Democrats have something to put up. But he is going to make them put it up -- even if they vote it down. 

Look at how the work order, so to speak, is framed (the letter is under the signature of Rahm Emanuel and Kathleen Sebelius):

We have seen again in recent days that when it comes to health care, the status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable. The proof is right in front of us: just last week, a major insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, announced plans to increase premiums for many of its policyholders in California by as much as 39 percent on March 1.

As the President noted this week, if we don’t act on comprehensive health insurance reform, this enormous rate hike will be "just a preview of coming attractions. Premiums will continue to rise for folks with insurance; millions more will lose their coverage altogether; our deficits will continue to grow larger."

Now is the time to act on behalf of the millions of Americans and small businesses who are counting on meaningful health insurance reform. In the last year, there has been an extraordinary effort to craft effective legislation. There have been hundreds of hours of committee hearings and mark-ups in both the House of Representatives and Senate, with nearly all of those sessions televised on C-SPAN. The Senate spent over 160 hours on the Senate floor considering health insurance reform legislation and, for the first time in history, both the House of Representatives and Senate have approved comprehensive health reform legislation. This is the closest our Nation has been to resolving this issue in the nearly 100 years that it has been debated...[snip]