Obama thrown lifeline on health reform

NEW YORK - Prospects of an agreement in the United States Congress on a sweeping overhaul of America's creaking healthcare system brightened yesterday after a group of conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives declared they had agreed a compromise they were willing to support.

The news, revealed by Representative Mike Ross, leader of the so-called Blue Dog Democrats on Capitol Hill, was a boost to Barack Obama as he held two back-to-back town-hall meetings in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

The main Democratic leadership in the House had been struggling for days to win over the party's conservative rump that had identified 10 different areas of the proposed legislation they could not support.

Ross said a new compromise would strip about 10 per cent from the cost of the reforms from US$1 trillion ($1.53 trillion) to about US$900 billion over 10 years.

Officials said the breakthrough would allow the compromise draft to go to full debate in the Energy and Commerce Committee. It remained unlikely, however, that a bill would reach the floor of the full House before it breaks for the northern summer at the end of this week as Obama had first hoped.

Progress in the US Senate on its version of the healthcare reform bill also seemed stop-start in nature. However, the Democrat Senator Max Baucus, who heads the key Senate Finance Committee, indicated that similar steps had been taken to pare down the overall cost of the reforms.

In Raleigh, Obama insisted there was no alternative to overhauling the current system.

"We can either continue with that approach, or we can choose another one - one that will bring down rising costs; provide quality, affordable insurance to every American; and help us get our exploding deficits under control," he said.

- INDEPENDENT