The U.S. Congress has approved sweeping health-care reform – America’s most dramatic and contentious social-welfare change in decades – that may define Barack Obama’s presidency.
“After nearly 100 years of talk and frustration, and decades of trying … we proved we are a people capable of doing big things,” said an exultant President.
“I know this wasn’t an easy vote for a lot of people, but it was the right vote,” Mr. Obama said shortly before midnight. “This moment is possible because of you,” he said to Americans, even though polls show the country bitterly divided over the reforms.
The President watched the fateful final few congressional hours on television in the White House with aides and political allies.
Officials said the room burst into cheers when the final vote was case and the President exchanged a high-five with his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
The vote capped a weekend of passionate pleas from the President for passage of the law, after he scrapped a trip to Indonesia and Australia to stay in Washington to press wavering Democrats fearful of voter retribution in November’s mid-term elections.
“Every once in a while, a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country,” Mr. Obama said at a pre-vote rally on the weekend. “This is one of those moments.”
In closing the debate at the end of a drama-filled evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said the reforms will unleash greater mobility and economic freedom. Americans will be able to “change jobs without losing health insurance,” she said. The reforms will make health care “affordable for the middle class.”
After a year of political arm-twisting, deal making and vicious partisan battles, Mr. Obama secured victory over unanimous Republican opposition by winning over wavering anti-abortion lawmakers with an executive order confirming that no federal money will pay for or subsidize abortions.
U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden and U.S. President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House after Congress passed historic health legislation on Sunday.
The vote on the bill – which had been passed in December by the Senate – was 219 to 212.
Republicans vowed to exact revenge in the November. Republican House Leader John Boehner of Ohio said his party would eventually repeal so-called Obama care. He warned that a “yes vote on the Democratic health-care bill is a vote for taxpayer-funded abortions” in what may be a harbinger of bitter election fights to come.
Democrats had to vote “on the Senate-passed bill, stuffed with tax hikes, Medicare cuts, and infamous backroom deals,” Mr. Boehner said, “and they will vote on something worse: their ‘fix’ with more taxes, more Medicare cuts, and new special deals.”
In sharp contrast, throughout long hours of debate , Democrats pointed to the historic nature of the rare Sunday vote. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, recalled the Medicare vote in 1965 and compared health-care reform to civil rights. This vote “is going to rank with the day we passed the civil-rights bill in 1964,” he said.
Earlier, the President wooed Hispanic congressmen – who were furious that millions of illegal immigrants would be barred even from buying health-care coverage – with a promise of immigration reform that will open a path for illegal newcomers to become citizens.
As angry groups of demonstrators, both for and against the bill, confronted each other on Capitol Hill and tens of thousands of Hispanics demanding immigration reform marched on the Washington Mall, the final act of a year-long political drama played out in Congress.
Supporters of the health-care legislation compared the moment to the 1935 passage of Social Security, or the introduction three decades later of Medicare, which is universal health care but only for the elderly.
