Democrats optimistic on health care summit

From TIME...

As President Barack Obama prepares to convene a health-care summit at the White House later this week, Administration officials are signaling that he intends to pursue a very different strategy for getting reform passed from the one used by his Democratic predecessor in office. Unlike the failed effort of 1994, when Bill and Hillary Clinton presented Congress with a detailed blueprint for reform — and never saw a bill reach the floor of either the House or Senate — Obama is outlining broad principles, with a bottom line of universal coverage, and leaving it up to lawmakers to fashion a plan for meeting them.

What this means is that the next few months will see a wide range of options under consideration, including ideas that go well beyond the health-care plan Obama proposed in his campaign, which centered on effort to expand coverage by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers. "Everything has got to be on the table — everything," says Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, who will be one of the key figures leading the effort on Capitol Hill. (See who's who in Obama's White House.)

At a breakfast with reporters on Tuesday morning, Baucus predicted that his committee could have legislation on the Senate floor as early as June, adding, "The conversation is going great guns." Among the ideas the six-term Montana Senator said he is willing to consider is one that has significant support among Republicans: changing the tax treatment of employer-provided health benefits, so that they might not be fully deductible for companies that provide them, and would be treated as income for the workers who receive them. Health-care experts say this would have the effect of encouraging more people to buy their insurance individually, rather than getting it where they work. This approach has been criticized by many Democrats — including Obama, when John McCain embraced a version of it during the election campaign — who contend that relying on the individual market would put health-care consumers at a disadvantage to big insurance companies.

But one proposal apparently not on his table is the dream of many liberals — a government-run system known as single-payer.

I'm split on Obama's health care stance just as I am on his economic policy. "Sicko" made a great argument for universal health care, but there are also arguments out there for keeping the system we have, or for other alternatives.