By THERESA POULSON
Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. (Credit: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
When the Obama administration backed down from a controversial veterans health care proposal in the face of widespread opposition, it got a taste of the difficulties it will face finding money to act on the president's many campaign promises -- especially in expensive and politically loaded areas like health care and taking care of veterans.
President Obama's budget outline for Veterans Affairs would increase the department's budget significantly, but it also called for billing veterans' private insurance providers for the treatment of some battle-related injuries. The proposal would have saved about $540 million, less than 1 percent of the department budget.
When the proposal came to light, veterans' advocates were quick to express opposition, and dozens of lawmakers from both sides of aisle were vocal in their disapproval. The administration quickly changed course.
"This was one of the largest increases for VA by an administration, and that all got lost in the message because of that proposal," said Joseph A. Violante, national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans. "It's the government's responsibility, not my insurance company's responsibility, to care for those disabilities that resulted from my honorable service in the military."
While the third-party billing plan wasn't a direct reneging of Obama's promise to expand benefits to more veterans, it brings to light the difficulties of finding ways to trim the budget in order to make funds available for new initiatives, such as bringing additional veterans into the VA network.
The proposal "wasn't an attempt to swindle veterans," said Jesse Broder Van Dyke, spokesman for Senate Veterans Affairs Chairman Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. "The money saved would have been kept at VA, but I think that this was a bad idea and it looked particularly bad."
Though the plan would have meant savings for the department, the cost of care would have been passed along to others, Violante said. "If you look at a severely disabled veteran, somebody who might be missing limbs or has traumatic brain injury or needs a lot of care ... their insurance company is not going to pay those additional costs without passing them on to somebody, whether it's the veteran themselves -- increasing their premiums -- or spreading that increase among all policy holders."
Updated at 9:38 a.m. on March 25.
By KEVIN FRIEDL
When President Obama signed into law an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Wednesday, he was keeping one promise while breaking another.
The measure, designed to expand health insurance to some 4 million additional children, was a significant step towards his pledge to "require that all children have health care coverage. And in his remarks at the signing ceremony, the president called it a "down payment" on his broader pledge to bring universal coverage to the U.S.
But by signing the bill the same afternoon it was passed in the House, Obama fell to an 0-2 record on one of his most specific good-government promises, announced over a year and a half ago during a campaign speech in Manchester, N.H.: "When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it."
The wording of that pledge has since been amended to refer only to "non-emergency legislation," but neither the SCHIP legislation nor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act he signed into law last week meet that test. The White House eventually did post the Ledbetter legislation online, but only after it had already been signed.
In response to inquiries, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro sent a statement reading in part, "We will be implementing this policy in full soon; currently we are working through implementation procedures and some initial issues with the congressional calendar."
The White House has made some progress towards fulfilling this promise. Whereas Ledbetter didn't appear on WhiteHouse.gov until after it was signed, the administration posted a link to the SCHIP bill on Feb. 1.
"Their actions are filling the spirit of openness they pledged," said John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, an open government group. "But they are so far failing to follow the letter of the pledge that they made."
Along with the link to the text of the legislation, the bill's page on WhiteHouse.gov included a commenting section -- but it is unclear from the site how that feedback is used, and there is no provision for seeing others' submissions or voting up and down suggestions, as there was on Obama's transition Web site. And then there is the complaint that taking feedback after a bill has already reached the president's desk means it's too late for tweaks and amendments.
"Ultimately, it seems to me that it is a meaningful thing for Obama to do, but not necessarily for immediate effects," said Wonderlich. "It's very unlikely he would veto something because of bad feedback. But it brings people into the process."
For progress updates on this and other campaign pledges, see National Journal.com's Promise Audit.
Updated at 1:05 p.m. on Feb. 5.
