US President Barack Obama on Saturday resumed his push to overhaul the health care system, telling a Congressional Black Caucus conference that there comes a time when “the cup of endurance runs over.”
“We have been waiting for health reform since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. We’ve been waiting since the days of Harry Truman,” he said in remarks at the caucus foundation’s annual dinner. “We’ve been waiting since Johnson and Nixon and Clinton.”
“We cannot wait any longer,” Obama said.
He spent the past week largely focused on global and economic issues in meetings with world leaders in New York and Pittsburgh.
At the G20 economic summit that wrapped up Friday in Pennsylvania, Obama told a story about an unnamed foreign leader who privately told the president he didn’t understand the at-times contentious debate over changing the health care system.
“He says, ‘We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you. That doesn’t make sense to me,’” Obama said, quoting the world leader he declined to identify.
The reference to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was to signs some people have waved outside of often testy town hall meetings this summer where lawmakers discussed Obama’s health care plan.
In the speech, Obama described his plan as one that would not require people with coverage to change anything but would make health insurance affordable for the millions of people who don’t have any. Republicans dispute those claims.
The Senate Finance Committee is in the process of amending a health care bill introduced by its chairman, Senator Max Baucus.
Before becoming president, Obama was the only senator in the all-Democratic caucus, which now has 42 members. He wasn’t particularly active in the group and isn’t especially close other members.
Animosity toward the president and his policies has bubbled up in recent weeks, most notably with Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” at Obama during the president’s recent health care speech to Congress.
Democrats from former US president Jimmy Carter on down have blamed the increasingly harsh criticism of Obama on racism. Obama says it’s not racism but an intense debate over the proper role of government.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS