Paging Dr. Obama

摘要

From the outset, president barackrnObama's strategy on health-care reform has been to study everything the Clinton Administration did in 1993 and '94-and do the opposite. Where Bill and Hillary Clinton delivered a byzantine bill of more than 1,300 pages to Capitol Hill, only to see it shredded once it got there, Obama has kept his distance from the fine print. He set forth a few ambitious goals: expanding coverage, reining in health-care spending, improving medical quality. And then he left it to Congress to develop a plan that could win the votes necessary to pass.rnUntil quite recently, that flexible approach appeared to be working pretty well. Congressional chairmen usually prefer having control to being told what to do by the White House. And interest groups and political adversaries that had been on opposite sides of past health-care battles were at the negotiating table, in no small part because Obama had convinced them that reform was really going to happen this time. As a result, the legislative process is already further along than it ever got under Clinton.