Is he offering 11th-hour concessions to Republicans?
It depends how you look at it. Last week’s televised bipartisan “summit” organised by the White House was just a gimmick, primarily designed to show the country that the Republicans were opposed to compromise of any kind. This week, he offered to incorporate some Republican ideas, notably on cutting fraud, and expanding so-called “health savings accounts”. But such changes would be pretty marginal. In any case, Republicans have rejected them as nothing more than a gambit by Democrats to win political cover for a measure that according to the polls, a majority of Americans now oppose. Why are the Republicans so unyielding? To paraphrase Harold Macmillan, “politics, dear boy, politics” – and in the US politics is an especially brutal, bare-knuckle sport. Republicans are sure healthcare reform will be a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” issue at the mid-term elections, at which they could conceivably regain control of both Senate and House. Support for it, they calculate, could be fatal for D
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- Is he offering 11th-hour concessions to Republicans?
