WASHINGTON  – The nation’s hospitals will give up $155 billion in future Medicare and Medicaid payments to help defray the cost of President Barack Obama’s health care plan, a concession the White House hopes will boost an overhaul effort that’s hit a roadblock in Congress.

Vice President Joe Biden announced the deal at the White House on Wednesday, with administration officials and hospital administrators at his side.
 
“Reform is coming. It is on track; it is coming. We have tried for decades to fix a broken system, and we have never, in my entire tenure in public life, been this close,” Biden said. And in a firm message to lawmakers, Biden added, “We must – and we will – enact reform by the end of August.”

Obama has set an ambitious timetable for legislation, with the hope of signing a comprehensive bill in October. But lawmakers returned Tuesday from their July 4 break with lots of questions about the complex legislation and deep misgivings about key elements under discussion.

Democratic senators in particular are having second thoughts about a proposed new tax on generous health insurance benefits provided by some employers. Without the tax – Republicans favor it as a brake on cost increases – the prospects for a bipartisan deal in the Senate appear to be in jeopardy.
   
Timing is critical because lawmakers might be reluctant to vote on such a charged issue as health care next year, when all House members and one-third of senators face elections.

“We’re not there yet,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has spent countless hours seeking a compromise with Republican colleagues. “I’m trying the best I can to get there soon.”

Another senator deeply involved in the bipartisan negotiations said the proposed new tax on the costliest employer-paid insurance benefits is quickly losing favor with Democrats.

“It’s clearly a very difficult issue,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., citing recent polls. “You go to the public to ask them what they think and they don’t like it.”

A compilation of surveys reviewed by senators showed at least 59 percent of the public opposed to taxing health care benefits to “pay for reform.”

As a result, Conrad said, “we’re looking at other options” to help finance a bill whose price tag is expected to reach $1 trillion or slightly more. Those other options may be hard to sell to Republicans whose support Baucus has been cultivating.

Baucus has long championed a tax on health benefits as the best way to pay for health care while simultaneously restraining the growth of the cost of coverage in the future. But the idea has drawn strong opposition from organized labor, a core Democratic constituency. House Democrats have been highly resistant, too, and Obama campaigned hard against it in last year’s run for the White House.
 
The deal with the hospitals – the one bright spot right now for Obama – may also be on shaky ground. Officials said it’s pegged to the Senate Finance Committee legislation that Baucus is negotiating, and whose prospects are uncertain. It would follow concessions from drug companies, and an announcement by Wal-Mart last week that it would support an employer requirement to help pay for health care.

Of the $155 billion in projected savings from hospitals, about $40 billion to $50 billion would come from reducing federal payments hospitals receive for providing care to uninsured and low-income patients, according to lobbyists. Those payments are now made through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The Medicaid cuts would be apportioned by state, as 10 percent annual reductions beginning around 2015.

Officials of public hospitals say they have concerns such reductions could also squeeze funding for trauma centers and burn units, which receive Medicare and Medicaid money. But they wanted to see the fine print.

Other savings of about $100 billion would come from slowing increases in planned Medicare payments to hospitals. A small amount of savings would come from trimming the money hospitals get for preventing patients from being readmitted for additional care.
 
Hospitals would also get something out of the deal. They won an agreement that if the Finance Committee’s legislation includes a public health insurance plan, it would reimburse hospitals at above the rates Medicare and Medicaid pay, which hospitals have long complained are insufficient.
  
The issue of a government insurance plan to compete against private companies continued to inflame sentiments on both sides of the political aisle. Republicans remain solidly opposed. Democrats, citing polls that show the public is open to the idea, are talking about a showdown on the issue.
 
Biden was joined at the White House by Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, Richard Bracken, president of Hospital Corporation of America, Wayne Smith, president of Community Health Systems, and Sister Carol Keehan, president of Catholic Health Association of the United States.      

“We know how urgently reform is needed, both for moral and economic purposes,” said Keehan, who represents Catholic hospitals.
  
House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio criticized the hospital deal, saying it was negotiated out of public view. “The administration and congressional Democrats are literally bullying health care groups into cutting backroom deals to fund a government takeover of health care,” Boehner said in a statement.

BUNKER HILL, W.Va.  – Embarking on a “listening tour,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked teachers, parents and students Tuesday how they would improve No Child Left Behind, the controversial education law championed by former President George W. Bush.

Duncan visited West Virginia, the first stop on a 15-state tour as the Obama administration prepares to try to overhaul the program.

“What do we need to do to get better?” Duncan asked about a dozen teachers and parents at Bunker Hill Elementary, a high-achieving school in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle.

President Barack Obama has pledged to rewrite the law, but he has been vague about how far he would go, or whether he would scrap it altogether.

“I don’t know if ’scrap’ is the word,” Duncan told reporters last week. “Where things make sense, we’re going to keep them. Where things didn’t make sense, we’re going to change them.”

Traveling through the rural terrain was a new experience for Duncan, a former big-city school superintendent in Chicago, where he was born and raised. In addition to holding forums where teachers, parents and administrators could vent, he visited a first-grade class to read the book, “Doggie Dreams” at Bunker Hill and ate lunch with fourth graders at Eagle Intermediate School in Martinsburg.

“Who’s the president now?” Duncan asked the first graders, one of whom correctly identified Obama. “Barack Obama, that’s important,” he said.

Duncan said little about the law Tuesday, preferring to listen to the concerns of teachers.

Special education teacher Lynn Reichard told him she works all year long to boost the self-esteem of mentally impaired students at Bunker Hill, only to see them fall apart over standardized tests.

“They feel so good about themselves, and then they look at a two-paragraph reading passage, and they know six words,” Reichard said. “I have one child here that’s a non-reader, and she’s going to have to take the test, and she’s going to cry.

“There’s just got to be another answer for that,” Reichard said.

The law does make allowances for different tests for severely impaired kids, but many don’t fall into that category.

Whatever the administration decides to do, it needs the approval of Congress, which passed the law with broad bipartisan support in 2001 but deadlocked over a rewrite in 2007.

Duncan gives the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of low-achieving students, a group that typically includes minority kids, English-language learners and kids with disabilities.

“Forevermore in our country, we can’t sweep those huge disparities with outcomes between white children and Latino children and African-American children, we can’t sweep those under the rug ever again,” Duncan said last week.

Yet Duncan has many criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and he has plenty of company. Opponents insist the law’s annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

Critics also say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to the Education Week newspaper.

That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law’s ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014.

“What No Child Left Behind did is, they were absolutely loose on the goals,” Duncan told the Education Writers Association meeting in Washington. “But they were very tight, very prescriptive on how you get there.

“I think that was fundamentally backwards,” he said.

Duncan said the federal government should be “tight” on the goals, insisting on more rigorous academic standards that are uniform across the states. And he said it should be “much looser” in terms of how states meet the goals.

The education community is watching closely to see just what Duncan means by “tight” and “loose.” So far, the administration has offered few clues.

Since the law’s passage, students have made modest gains, at least in elementary and middle school, the grades that are the focus of No Child Left Behind. The biggest gains have come among lower-achieving students, the kids who now are getting unprecedented attention.

The story is different in high school, where progress seems stalled and where the dropout rate, a dismal one in four children, has not budged.

WASHINGTON  – A small, single-engine plane strayed into restricted air space near the U.S. Capitol on Friday, forcing anxious officials to place the White House in temporary lockdown and take steps to evacuate the U.S. Capitol.

The episode was over within minutes as two F-16 fighter jets and two Coast Guard helicopters were dispatched to intercept the plane and escort it to an airport in Maryland, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. U.S. Northern Command spokesman Michael Kucharek said the two helicopters established communications with the pilot.

The plane landed at Indian Head Airport in Charles County, Md., where airport owner Gil Bauserman said the aircraft had been flying from Maine to North Carolina. Bauserman said the military notified the airport that the plane would be making an unscheduled landing at 12:45 p.m. EDT. The plane landed 15 minutes later, escorted by the F-16s and the helicopters.

“It was just a navigation mistake, the GPS went and the pilot got confused,” Bauserman said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“This has happened many times. The restricted zone in D.C., all it does is catch poor innocent people. They’ve never caught a terrorist, it’s just people making a mistake,” he said.

The airport, with a runway of about 3,000 feet, is located about 12 miles south of Andrews Air Force Base.

The pilot and his wife were en route to North Carolina to visit the couple’s daughter, according to Bauserman.

President Barack Obama was believed to be in the White House at the time. The White House declined to say where the president was, but Obama went ahead with a 1:30 p.m. EDT appearance in the Diplomatic Reception Room to discuss affordable college education.

The Senate was in session, and briefly recessed. The House was not meeting.

Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Capitol’s alert level was briefly elevated but quickly returned to normal.

Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said the security measures were taken “out of an abundance of caution.”

Across the street from the Capitol, there was no interruption of a House hearing at which former Vice President Al Gore was testifying about climate change legislation.

Authorities have been on high alert for planes entering airspace in and around major government buildings since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON – Lobbyists and leaders of public interest groups are meeting with White House officials to seek a roll back of the ban on lobbyists discussing economic stimulus projects with federal officials.

President Barack Obama imposed the prohibition last month in hopes of reducing the influence lobbyists might have over how the $787 billion economic stimulus package will be doled out. Lobbyists have complained that the rules inhibit their freedom of speech.

Dave Wenhold, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said he would meet Thursday with White House ethics officer Norm Eisen. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also will attend, Wenhold said.

Gov. Bev Perdue will host and lead the fourth in a series of Regional White House Forums on Health Reform on Tuesday.  The event will bring together a diverse group of people to voice their concerns and ideas on reforming the nation’s health care system. Among the expected participants: doctors, patients, providers, insurers, businesses and the public.

The event will be streamed live at www.governor.state.nc.us and will be available on satellite.

The forum will begin with a video message recorded by President Obama.  A representative from the Obama administration will attend.

The forum will take place at the Alumni-Foundation Event Center at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro from 10:30 a.m. to noon Tuesday.

WASHINGTON – The White House says former Vice President Dick Cheney is the second most popular member of the “Republican cabal,” behind only talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday brushed off Cheney’s criticism of President Barack Obama’s new administration. Cheney said Sunday on CNN that Obama’s decisions are threatening the nation’s safety.

Obama reversed many of his predecessor’s executive orders, including how the country treats suspected terrorists.
 
Gibbs says Obama is keeping the nation safe and dealing with problems George W. Bush’s administration did not.

Gibbs says his sarcasm shouldn’t mask serious policy differences between Obama and the Bush-Cheney team.

WASHINGTON  – President Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are seeking a stronger relationship between the world body and its single biggest backer.

Obama invited Ban to a White House meeting Tuesday to discuss a range of global security and development issues, the first meeting of the two leaders since the inauguration. Also scheduled to attend is Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who emphasized the meeting’s symbolism as an example of a new U.S. multilateralism.

Obama sees the U.N. “as an important venue and vehicle for the advancement of our national security and foreign policy goals, and as a venue in which we can seek to enhance cooperation on a wide range of international security, development and other issues,” Rice said at U.N. headquarters in New York before heading to Washington.

Among the major concerns is the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where the Sudanese president kicked out aid groups after an International Criminal Court arrest warrant charged him with war crimes. Other issues on the agenda are the global financial meltdown, an international climate treaty, poverty and human rights.

Ban, who became secretary-general in January 2007, has promoted a good working relationship with the United States.

A month into his new job, Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, met Obama by chance aboard a shuttle flight to New York. It was the same month Obama declared his candidacy for president.

During much of President George W. Bush’s tenure, the United States had a difficult relationship with the U.N., particularly when John Bolton was U.S. ambassador to the world body for 16 months in 2005-2006. Bolton pressed for sanctions against Iran and North Korea and an overhaul of the United Nations, antagonizing many U.N. member states.

But during the last two years of the Bush administration, Bolton’s successor, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, became known as a gregarious and affable diplomat who improved relations somewhat.

The United States has agreed to pay nearly a quarter of the U.N.’s $4.86 billion operating budget, but is perennially late with its dues.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had her first meeting with Ban last week in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, on the sidelines of an international donor conference for rebuilding Gaza. The two, along with the European Union and Russia, also work together in a so-called Quartet of international mediators seeking to forge progress toward peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Ban used that occasion to press for additional cash for U.N. peacekeepers who have been stretched thin worldwide and for the United States to set an example in tackling global warming.

Clinton assured Ban he could count on U.S. leadership to reduce carbon dioxide, methane and other industrial gases that trap heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

The U.N. chief’s top priority this year is to encourage global leaders to adopt a new international climate treaty at a conference in December in Copenhagen.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama never had a helicopter, which he says might explain why he’s perfectly happy with the current White House fleet and doesn’t need a more costly one.

At the conclusion of a fiscal summit Monday, Obama faced questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including his former presidential rival, Sen. John McCain. McCain bemoaned cost overruns in military procurement. The new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters – now over budget at $11.2 billion – will cost more than Air Force One.

Obama said the helicopter he has now seems adequate, adding that he never had a helicopter before and “maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.”

Obama said he has already talked to Defense Secretary Robert Gates about reviewing the program and its ballooning costs.

WASHINGTON- After an evening of black tie grandeur at the White House, governors planned to return Monday morning for a business meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss how to spend the economic stimulus money soon flowing to their states.

Concluding a three-day winter meeting of the National Governors Association devoted largely to a discussion of the stimulus bill, governors planned to bring questions and offer ideas to Obama at a 90-minute meeting Monday morning.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat and the NGA chairman, said he planned to press the president on the need for more investment in infrastructure projects like road and bridge repair going forward.

“Although the stimulus program is a great first step, we want to impress on the president that it’s only a first step. We need to plan for the future, for the next five to 10 years,” Rendell said Sunday.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman who has criticized the stimulus plan, said he nonetheless looked forward to hearing Obama’s views on repairing the distressed economy.

“He’s a new president, and we certainly owe him that,” Barbour said.

White House officials said that for his part, Obama would stress the need for accountability and transparency in how the governors spend the stimulus funds. He issued a similar warning to the nation’s mayors on Friday, saying he would “call them out” if they waste the money.

At the governors’ meeting, Obama planned to name Earl Devaney, a former Secret Service agent who helped expose lobbyists’ corruption at the Interior Department, to head the new Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. Vice President Joe Biden also will be given a role coordinating oversight of stimulus spending, officials said.

Obama created the board as an at-large body to oversee how the government spends the $787 billion stimulus package.

Sunday night, the president and first lady Michelle Obama hosted the governors for a black-tie dinner at the White House – the Obamas’ first since last month’s inauguration.

“Our goal is to make life easier and not harder for you during the time that we’re here in Washington,” Obama told the governors. “I want you to know that despite our occasional differences, my hope is that we can all work together.”