The Periscope Post

President Barack Obama unveiled his $950 billion plan for the healthcare reform in the US yesterday afternoon, ahead of Thursday’s televised bi-partisan summit, and with enough time between now and then for media outlets to get their teeth into it.

Check out how the White House explains the new proposal.

US politics newsblog, Politico.com, reported this morning that House Democrats feel like the President’s proposal is their last best chance to get healthcare reform through Congress. Democrats are on board with Obama’s plan, which shares more elements with the Senate version of the bill than with the House, if only because an imperfect plan is better than no plan at all.

The Boston Globe – one of the major papers in a state that enacted sweeping reforms in health care in the last few years – applauded Obama’s plan, especially highlighting the piece of the President’s proposal that gives the government the power to regulate or deny excessive premium increases by insurance carriers. Better still for Obama, the new bill puts him and his party in a much more tenable position: “Politically, the new proposal puts Obama and the Democrats on the side of the consumer and against insurers, at a time when some annual rate increases are approaching 40 percent and the five largest providers alone reported $12.2 billion in profits last year. Obama can now dare congressional Republicans to defend the insurers when they all meet for their health summit Thursday.”

In its analysis of the President’s proposal, The Washington Post noted that despite the Democrat’s loss of a filibuster-proof majority the Senate and the widespread speculation that Obama would have to drastically scale back the scope of his reform, the plan is striking in large part “for the extent to which it hews to the basic scale and framework of the bills on which Congress has toiled for months.”

If the effort fails, however, Obama will have a much more difficult time in winning back the confidence of the American people, White House aides told The Washington Post, and “providing more ammunition to Republicans that the party in power cannot govern effectively.”

Speaking of Republicans, the conservative party’s reaction to Obama’s plan, The Washington Post reported, has been largely the same and largely negative: Republicans have consistently claimed over the last few weeks – especially after their victory in Massachusetts put Senator Scott Brown in power – that Obama should scrap the current reform plan and start over. Now, they say, Obama’s proposal is just more of the same policies that they’ve been pushing back on.

In the UK, The Guardian also weighed in on Obama’s healthcare proposal: In a leading editorial, the paper wrote that Obama “enunciated principles but remained haughtily vague on the details, leaving it up to Congress to hammer them out.” And while the health care proposal may be Democrats last best chance to get reform through Congress, it might also be Obama’s last best chance to show that he can lead the nation:  ”[T]here is no way back for him and no obvious tactical retreat. If this attempt fails, his presidency will be bogged down.”