In Tuesday night’s speech before a joint session of Congress, Bush plans to dangle ideas — some new, some recycled — on reducing America’s energy dependence and making health care more available, among other areas. Aware that 2008 presidential contenders and new Democratic leaders present fierce competition for headlines, the president has a much-abbreviated topic list in an attempt to hold the public’s attention.

In the days ahead of the 9 p.m. EST (10:00 a.m. Wednesday, Taiwan time) speech, the White House took great pains to detail its health care ideas. The cold reception they received on Capitol Hill offered a striking reminder of the difficulty the president faces in the new political climate. Bush is proposing to change how the tax code treats health insurance, by counting employer contributions toward health insurance as taxable income while establishing a standard deduction for anyone with insurance.

The White House says it would introduce increased market forces to the health care industry and make coverage more affordable for the uninsured. Aides estimated the plan would represent a tax increase for only about 20 percent of employer-covered workers.

But Democratic Rep. Pete Stark, the chairman of a key health subcommittee in the House, said he would not consider even holding hearings on the proposal. He dismissed it as a dead-on-arrival attempt to encourage employers to stop offering health insurance.

America does not have a national health care system. Most people who have health insurance coverage receive it as a job benefit; the poor and elderly can turn to state welfare programs for assistance.

Bush’s overall agenda for the speech is twofold: present himself to the public as a leader with a sincere desire to work across party lines on practical solutions, and place pressure onto Democratic leaders to either go along or devise their own alternatives.

“The presidential season is already upon us. I am personally very skeptical that they will make major progress,” said Peter Robinson, a former White House speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who now is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “But they must make the attempt; they must make a good-faith effort.”

There is no escaping Iraq’s giant shadow.

Bush was not expected to rehash the much-hyped speech he gave less than two weeks ago laying out his revamped war plan, the centerpiece of which is a 21,500-soldier increase in the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Instead, he was to broadly defend his stand that Iraq is part of a war on terror that will make Americans safer.

On Capitol Hill, the push-back from congressional Republicans to the troop increase grew even on the eve of the president’s speech.

Three Republican senators and one moderate Democrat unveiled nonbinding legislation on Monday expressing disagreement with Bush’s plan and urging him to consider “all options and alternatives.” “We’ve had four other surges since we first went into Iraq,” said Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the sponsors. “None of them produced a long-lasting change in the situation on the ground.”

In the House, members of the Republican leadership drafted a series of what they called “strategic benchmarks” and said the White House should submit monthly reports to Congress measuring the Iraqi government’s progress in meeting them.

Meanwhile, majority Democrats intend to hold votes within days in the House and Senate on tougher bills declaring that the troop increase is “not in the national interest.”

Subscribe to The China Post and save.  Click hereSharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 800 characters max

Receive China Post promos

Respond to this email