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Kennedy Set for Major Push on Health Bill
Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY
November 21, 2008
WASHINGTON — When he endorsed Barack Obama for president in January, Sen. Edward Kennedy said it was because his young colleague "understands what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ "
Ten months later, the haunting quote that Obama made a theme of his campaign holds an even deeper significance for Kennedy.
Though battling incurable brain cancer, the 76-year-old Massachusetts Democrat returned to Capitol Hill this week. He’s a man on a mission that so far has proved impossible: enactment of comprehensive health care legislation that would provide coverage for the nation’s estimated 47 million people who don’t have health insurance.
“I am looking forward to working with Barack Obama on health care,” Kennedy said Monday as he headed to a luncheon with his staff after a six-month absence. The senator leaned on a silver-headed cane but otherwise looked hale, his trademark white mane intact despite continuing cancer treatments.
Kennedy’s reappearance six months to the day after he had the seizure that led to his brain cancer diagnosis sets up a potentially dramatic race against time as he seeks to cajole the notoriously slow-moving Senate into delivering the capstone of his four-decade legislative career.
Opening up the nation’s health care system to all Americans is “the cause of my life,” Kennedy told delegates to the Democratic National Convention, where he made an emotional and unexpected appearance last August.
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It won’t be easy to achieve. The effort to provide universal health care coverage — and figure out how to pay for it — turned into a political catastrophe for former president Bill Clinton and then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and cost the Democrats control of Congress in the 1994 elections.
As a result, Democrats are approaching health care reform cautiously. In his campaign, Obama made expanding access to health care a key issue, but he stopped short of the goal long held by many Democrats of a single, government-run system. Instead, the president-elect is proposing to expand the current employer-based system.
Some Democrats are urging a go-slow approach. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he’s more concerned with “doing it right rather than doing it within a set time frame.”
Even so, the growing numbers of uninsured Americans and the skyrocketing costs for employers is creating momentum for action. While Republicans will not accept a health care system that’s government-run, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., says he sees possibilities for bipartisan compromise. “If it includes private choices, including being able to buy your own policy and choose your own doctor, then we can talk,” said Alexander, the third-ranking Senate Republican leader.
