Coverage of the Health Care Summit abounds:
Still Stalemated After Summit; Politico - Feb 25, 2010-02-25
President Barack Obama called on Democrats and Republicans to find a health care compromise in the next few weeks that has eluded them for a year -- but made it clear that he's prepared to short-circuit Senate rules to get reform passed if they fail.
"The question that I'm going to ask myself, and I'm going to ask of all of you, is, is there enough serious effort that in a month's time, or in a few weeks time, or six weeks time, we could actually resolve something," Obama said to close the seven-hour health care summit. "And if we can't then I think we've got to go ahead and make some decisions."
Republicans said the same thing in their closing comments that they said at 10 a.m. - start over. Obama won't. So the parties walked out of Blair House almost exactly the way they walked in - completely at odds over the best way to fix the health insurance system. There were modest efforts around the edges to find common ground - on reining in waste and fraud and keeping the deficit in check - but no broad agreements on the shape of reform.
Little Sign of Common Ground at Health-Care Summit; The Washington Post -Feb 25, 2010
President Obama held more than six hours of talks Thursday with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on ways to salvage health-care reform legislation now stalled in Congress but ran into stiff opposition from GOP members who rejected key provisions and insisted that the effort start again from scratch.
At the end of the day-long discussions at Blair House -- a debate that turned contentious at times -- Obama urged Republicans to "do a little soul-searching" on measures they would accept to address what he called the core of the problem: covering more than 30 million Americans without health insurance and preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
Partisan Divides Continue to Cloud Summit; The Wall Street Journal--Feb 25, 2010
President Barack Obama and leaders of both political parties sat face to face for a long day of talks over the Democrats' stalled health-care bill, sparring over the parties' approaches and trading some pointed barbs but making little apparent headway toward a bipartisan approach to a deal on legislation.
The president started the televised back-and-forth with a call not to let the health-care summit descend into "political theater," but the session featured sharp partisan disputes from both sides about the Democrats' bill and how they might pass it.
"This is an issue that is affecting everybody," the president told nearly 40 congressional leaders gathered with him around a square table at the Blair House, across the street from the White House. "Everybody understands that the problem is not getting better, it is getting worse."
Republicans said the president was overreaching and that his party should scrap the bill and start over, and criticized the messy negotiations in Congress of the last year.
At Health Care Session, Obama Stresses Areas of Agreement ; The New York Times - Feb. 25, 2010
President Obama opened his much anticipated health care forum on Thursday by calling on Democrats and Republicans to "focus not just on where we differ but focus on where we agree," as Republicans called for the president to scrap his bill and start over.
Plus, both The New York Times and The Washington Post offered real time blog coverage of the summit:
The New York Times healthcare summit blog.
The Washington Post healthcare summit blog.
