...03/20/2010
In the jittery days following Scott Brown’s Senate victory, Nancy Pelosi was eager to resurrect comprehensive health reform. But first, she had to get past longtime ally Rahm Emanuel, who was counseling President Barack Obama to consider a smaller, piecemeal approach.
During a mid-February conference call with top House Democrats, Pelosi made it clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push — dismissing the White House chief of staff as an “incrementalist.”
Pelosi even coined a term to describe Emanuel’s scaled-down approach: “Kiddie Care,” according to a person privy to the call.
Pelosi’s remark was more than just a diss. It sent a clear signal to House leadership that Pelosi wouldn’t compromise — and it coincided with Obama’s own decision to renew his push for an all-encompassing bill after weeks of confusion and discussion.
In the end, Pelosi, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) braved a political backlash to pursue comprehensive reform, green-lighting a two-step reconciliation process that requires the House to approve a Senate health bill reviled by many House Democrats...
read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2010/03/pelosi-steeled-wh-for-health-push-034753
Guardian:
____In the grim weeks after Martha Coakley lost her campaign for Ted Kennedy's US Senate seat, Democrats were the picture of discombobulation. They had passed their healthcare bill in both the House and the Senate, but each chamber still needed to vote on final legislation that merged their separate versions. Now, Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof Senate majority, and the winner of the special election, Republican Scott Brown, was vowing to torpedo the final procedural business required to make the bill law. It was obvious that Obama and his advisers had no Plan B in place for a Coakley loss. No one knew what the White House planned to do next.
The day after Brown's victory, in an interview with ABC News, Obama appeared to signal that he planned to pursue a scaled-back form of health care reform: "To coalesce around those elements in the package that people agree on," as he put it. In the following days, it became clear that this was the strategy being pushed by Emanuel. In fact, from the very beginning, Emanuel had advised the president to pursue more modest goals – doubtless burned by his experience as a White House staffer when the Clinton administration suffered the catastrophic defeat of its healthcare overhaul in the 1990s. Overridden by Obama, Emanuel had been a good soldier and fought aggressively for the president's policy. But now that it had hit the rocks, he advised him to settle for reining in the most egregious insurance company abuses and expanding coverage for low-income families. In the Senate, majority leader Harry Reid also appeared to favour putting healthcare on the backburner.
The one Democratic leader who never publicly wavered from comprehensive reform was Pelosi, who derisively referred to Emanuel's downgraded proposal as "Kiddie Care". Members of her own caucus entreated her to think small, but she made it clear she would opt for nothing less than a sweeping change to the healthcare system. "My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive," she later told reporters.
Obama, too, eventually chose the comprehensive path. And by inviting Republicans to a bipartisan healthcare summit, he changed the political conversation over healthcare reform at a crucial moment. But it was Pelosi who had to do the heaviest lifting – by convincing her members to vote for the Senate bill, which they didn't much like, and by ensuring that the Senate would approve a package of fixes to its legislation that made it passably palatable to her caucus. In her way stood a series of obstacles that would give most normal people a migraine so intractable that insurance companies would deem it a pre-existing condition. There was Bart Stupak and his faction of anti-abortion Democrats. There was the equally large bloc of pro-choice lawmakers who threatened to revolt if Stupak's demands for restrictions on insurance coverage of abortions prevailed. There were the unions, livid at the idea that the House might entrench the Senate's tax on high-cost health plans. There was Dennis Kucinich. Each week seemed to bring an explanation of some obscure parliamentary manoeuvre that had been proposed and proved impossible.
Throughout it all, Pelosi remained adamant that healthcare reform would pass. Perhaps with good cause: her father was a local Democratic pol in Baltimore renowned for his vote-counting prowess, and so far Pelosi has shepherded any number of contentious legislative measures through the House over the objections of more conservative Democrats without a single defeat. Even when it was not at all clear that she had the support she needed to pass the bill in the House, she declared, "we will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn't work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get healthcare reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit." And in the end, she brought her caucus with her – a feat that, despite the lack of media recognition so far, makes her one of the most canny and effective congressional leaders Democrats have seen in decades...
read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/23/healthcare-reform-nancy-pelosi
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