White House Continues To Slam Insurers!

President Obama spoke about his health care plans Wednesday in Missouri.

 

March 10, 2010 5:07 p.m. EST

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama is set to turn up the heat on private health insurers again Wednesday, taking his increasingly populist health care overhaul pitch on the road to the political battleground state of Missouri.

In addition to hitting insurers -- which he also did in a campaign-style speech in Pennsylvania on Monday -- the president is set to tackle the issue of Medicare fraud.

Earlier in the day, Obama dispatched Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to address the annual conference of America's Health Insurance Plans, an insurance industry lobbying group.

"You have a choice," Sebelius said. "You can choose to continue your opposition to reform ... [or] you can choose to take the millions of dollars you have stored away for your next round of ads to kill meaningful reform and use them to start giving Americans some relief from their skyrocketing premiums."

More than 1,000 protesters, including representatives of organized labor, marched through downtown Washington on Tuesday to the Ritz Carlton, site of the conference.

The marchers were led by, among others, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a prominent backer of overhaul legislation.

The health care debate is "about one thing," Dean said. "Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?"

The increasingly sharp rhetoric from the administration and elsewhere is designed both to bolster sagging health care overhaul poll numbers and to intensify pressure on wavering congressional Democrats.

Obama has called for a final up or down vote in Congress within the next few weeks. No Republicans are expected to vote for the nearly $1 trillion package.

"Democrat leaders aren't listening to the American people," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday morning. They want to "shove this government takeover of the health care system down the throats of the American people," he said.

Only 25 percent of Americans believe that Congress should pass a health care bill similar to one that Democratic leaders have been working on for the past year, according to a February 12-15 CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll. But the survey also noted that Americans overwhelmingly approve of many of the bill's specific provisions.

Video: Insurance execs under fire

GOP leaders are livid over the Democratic strategy for passing an overhaul bill.

If the House approves the Senate version of the bill, according to Democratic sources, a separate package of changes designed in part to make the overall measure more palatable to House liberals would then be approved by both chambers, getting through the Senate under a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation. Bills passed under reconciliation require only a bare Senate majority of 51 votes.

Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60-seat supermajority with the election in January of Republican Sen. Scott Brown to the Massachusetts seat formerly held by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Liberal House Democrats contend, among other things, that the Senate bill does not include an adequate level of subsidies to help middle- and lower-income families purchase coverage. They also object to the Senate's proposed tax on expensive insurance plans.

Separately, a handful of socially conservative House Democrats argue that the Senate plan doesn't do enough to ensure that taxpayer funds are not used to fund abortions.

Republicans, meanwhile, contend that reconciliation, which is limited to provisions pertaining to the budget, was never meant to facilitate the passage of a sweeping measure along the lines of the health care bill.

Four Senate Republicans who previously served in the House held a news conference Wednesday to warn nervous House Democrats that there is no guarantee the reconciliation strategy will succeed.

A unified Senate GOP caucus will fight to prevent changes promised by the Democratic leadership, they said.

House Democrats "better think long and hard" about voting for the Senate plan if they don't like it, said Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota. "If you vote for the Senate-passed bill, you own the Senate-passed bill."

If the House passes the Senate bill, "the Senate bill will become law," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina. "We're here to guarantee" the measure won't be changed by the Senate.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, predicted such a turn of events would be politically catastrophic for the Democrats.

If Senate bill passes, it will be "the paramount issue that will see a lot of [Democrats] going home for good after the November elections," he said.

Thunder