When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises - but his family is with him - it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.” “How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present.
Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. But when a government plan has to deal with the same issues of runaway spending and out-of-control technology that the insurers have to address, it will be interesting to see how differently it comes across to consumers.WASHINGTON - This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. In an earlier letter to Senators Baucus and Kennedy, President Obama said that a public option was necessary to keep insurance companies "honest." That's a very defensible political stance, because the public hates insurers and HMOs-and they certainly have good reason in some cases. The AMA has already said that's a non-starter, and even though the association doesn't represent the majority of physicians, it's likely that many other doctors will oppose it, too. And if they're going to pay physicians and hospitals only a bit more than Medicare does, they probably intend to require providers to participate in the public plan as a condition of Medicare participation. That may be overstating the case, but most Democrats don't seem inclined to compromise on their goal of creating a strong, national public plan. He cited research showing that "in some parts of the country, nearly 30 percent of Medicare enrollees report they cannot find doctors willing to take new patients, due to below market rates." Of course, this is inconsistent: If many physicians aren't willing to see new patients at Medicare rates, the public option poses little threat to private insurers.
Obama white house organizational chart word doc plus#
(Actually, the House committees' proposal would pay them at Medicare plus 5 percent.) According to Scott Serota, president of the Blue Cross & Blue Shield Association, a public plan would also create access issues if it paid so little. Insurance companies argue that a government-run plan would put them at a disadvantage if it paid providers at Medicare rates. then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?" Obama said at a White House news conference. "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care. President Obama today rebutted insurance industry claims that the proposed "public option"-a government-sponsored plan that would compete with private insurers-would lead to the end of the employer-based insurance system.
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