"President Obama's campaign for health care reform by this fall, once considered highly likely to succeed, suddenly appears in real jeopardy," reports Politico.
"Top White House advisers, especially Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are still privately predicting massive changes to the health care system in 2009. But for the first time, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration are expressing frank worries about stronger-than-expected opposition from moderate Democrats and worse-than-expected estimates for how much the plan could cost."
The New York Times notes "it is the cost of the legislation that seems to bedevil lawmakers the
most. A budget office estimate of $1.6 trillion as the cost of an
earlier Finance Committee draft sent members hunting for ways to pare
the expense."
Ezra Klein got his hands on a dramatically scaled-back Senate Finance Committee proposal that tries to reign in costs. Another interesting change: There's no public plan mentioned anywhere in the document.
However, Nate Silver observes that at least so far, "there is no sign of erosion
in the public's support for health care reform. And the Administration
appears poised to begin doing some more explicit advocacy for the
legislation, beginning with a one-hour national forum on June 24th. But
it had better be prepared for that town hall meeting to be a start of a
trend, because history suggests that leaving a health care bill
unattended before Congress is just about the worst place for it to be."
