•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

US President Barack Obama's historic drive to extend health insurance to nearly all Americans stood Sunday on the cusp of passage through the House of Representatives after an 11th-hour deal.

After days of hard-fought negotiations, Obama pledged to sign an executive order reaffirming a longstanding US ban on government funding for abortions, winning support for the bill from a group of conservative Democratic holdouts.

"I've always supported health care reform," said the group's leader, Democratic Representative Bart Stupak, flanked by other anti-abortion lawmakers. "This bill is going to go through."

The breakthrough made it all but certain that Obama's Democratic allies had locked down the 216 votes needed to ensure passage of the sweeping legislation over united Republican opposition in a ballot expected late in the day.

"We're well past 216," boasted Stupak, who spoke to reporters moments after White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said Obama would decree that "restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented."

Obama's health care plan, a compromise between rival House and Senate versions of the bill passed last year, would bring the world's richest country closer than ever to guaranteeing health care coverage for the first time to all its citizens.

Using a blend of expanded government health programs and subsidies for millions to buy private insurance, the bill would add some 32 million Americans to the ranks of those covered for a total of 95 percent of Americans.

Frustrated Republicans, united in opposition to the bill, said they would keep up the fight against the measure, which would usher in the most sweeping overhaul of its kind in four decades.

Republicans assailed the proposal in often bitter debate on the floor of the House and took turns encouraging hundreds of protestors outside the Capitol, holding up signs that read "Kill The Bill" and loudly chanting that slogan.

Inside, Republican Representative Paul Ryan leveled angry charges that the legislation would crush the free market in the heavy hand of government while raising taxes and creating a bevy of inefficient agencies.

"This bill is a fiscal Frankenstein," he said. "It's not too late to get it right, let's start over, let's defeat this bill."

Republicans also vowed to keep up the fight in the Senate -- the next battleground -- and repeal the broadly unpopular bill if they win back majorities in the November midterm elections.

The Democratic plan called for the House to approve the Senate version of the legislation, sending it to Obama to sign into law, then pass a package of "fixes" to make it more like the House-passed health care bill.

The Senate would then take up the changes and approve them separately, under rules that prevent Republicans from using a parliamentary tactic, the filibuster, to indefinitely delay and therefore kill the measure.

Senate Republicans plan to besiege the legislation with "hundreds of amendments," to "highlight what is in the bill that is bad," one of their leaders, John Cornyn, told Fox News.

They also planned to challenge specific provisions of the bill as not having a direct effect of reducing the deficit, a requirement under the process Democrats have invoked to pass the bill, he said.

Cornyn acknowledged that Vice President Joe Biden, the Senate's presiding officer, could declare the amendments to be purely delaying tactics and call a vote on the legislation.

"I guarantee it will happen on television ... for 300 million people to see and I think there will be a terrible price to be paid for this sort of defying public opinion," said Cornyn.

Recent public opinion polls have painted a confusing picture, with respondents expressing strong support for individual elements of the bill, but with large numbers saying they oppose the overall measure.

Democrats have highlighted the independent Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the bill would cost 940 billion dollars over the next 10 years, while cutting 143 billion dollars from the bloated US deficit through 2019 and 1.2 trillion over the following decade.

The House vote on what Obama has called "the toughest insurance reforms in history" would come a century after president Theodore Roosevelt called for a national approach to US health care.

AFP