WASHINGTON – A high-stakes White House summit intended to find common ground between Republicans and Democrats on how to remake the nation’s health care system instead exposed political fault lines Thursday that both sides were unsure could be straddled.
WASHINGTON – A high-stakes White House summit intended to find common ground between Republicans and Democrats on how to remake the nation’s health care system instead exposed political fault lines Thursday that both sides were unsure could be straddled.
"We have a very difficult gap to bridge here," Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, said in reference to Democrats’ stalemated legislation to extend coverage to more than 30 million people who are now uninsured. "We just can’t afford this. That’s the ultimate problem."
But Obama and Democratic leaders cast the reform they want as critical to tackling an issue that is even more pressing to many Americans — the struggling economy.
Republicans opened the summit by urging President Obama to "start over" on health care reform and to renounce an unusual move to sidestep a GOP filibuster.
But the Democrats repeatedly highlighted several points of agreement on health care reform with the GOP in an effort to show that it made no sense to start over again.
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