Healthcare, Obama-style — not Clinton-style

President Obama is launching his massive healthcare overhaul this week determined not to repeat mistakes made in a similarly ambitious bid by the Clinton administration 16 years ago.

The president formally nominated Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) to lead the effort as his Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, and he will host a slew of lawmakers, interest groups and healthcare experts for a White House summit on health reform Thursday.

{mosads}With these steps, Obama wades into an issue that could define his presidency, setting forth an agenda that is wide in its scope and has been attempted by some of his predecessors in the past 60 years, sometimes to the detriment of their legacies.

“There’s no easy formula for fixing our healthcare system,” Obama said Monday at a press conference with Sebelius. “There will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve this reform. And that’s why I’m bringing together business and labor, doctors and insurers, Democrats and Republicans, as well as ordinary Americans from all walks of life to the White House this Thursday.”

The failure of President Clinton’s similarly grand first-term campaign on health reform remains fresh in Washington’s political memory.

Critics, including Democrats, lambasted Clinton and then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for not adequately including Congress, interest groups and the public in their administration’s planning on healthcare. Clinton, these critics say, also waited too long to begin his push on reform, which started in the latter part of his first year in office.

Obama is trying to show he’s learned from those mistakes, and the summit is a part of that effort.

“The summit is an excellent way to really start this process in a participatory manner,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of the liberal healthcare advocacy group Families USA. “It’s obviously not the be-all and end-all,” however, he stressed. “It’s not the place where the important decisions will be made.”

The president and his senior aides have deliberately left many key questions unanswered, even though Obama campaigned on a platform that included a framework for health reform. His administration is deferring to Congress to work out the sticky details.

Key Democrats on Capitol Hill, such as Sens. Edward Kennedy (Mass.) and Max Baucus (Mont.), have been working together and with a broad array of interest groups since last year to set the stage for reform.

Independent groups representing a range of points of view have also been working on their own during that time to shore up support on broad principles of health reform.

The early weeks of Obama’s presidency have been occupied with the struggling economy and the damaged financial system — not healthcare.

{mospagebreak}Still, Obama has insisted health reform is a 2009 priority, as have his congressional allies and reform-minded constituencies ranging from big business to organized labor to a variety of healthcare interests.

Just one month ago, that timeline — already optimistic — seemed in serious jeopardy when former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Obama’s first HHS nominee and health czar, had to withdraw over unpaid taxes.

{mosads}With this week’s nominations and summit, Obama is sending the clear signal that he and his administration are now fully engaged in healthcare.

“He’s got his momentum back,” said Donna Shalala, President Clinton’s HHS secretary.

Besides formally nominating Sebelius on Monday, Obama also named a new director of his White House Office of Health Reform, former Clinton appointee Nancy-Ann DeParle.

Obama also has managed to stay on schedule: Before Daschle departed, March was understood to be the month when the White House would ramp up its work on healthcare.

The Obama administration, in office less than two months, already has taken some steps on healthcare, as the president emphasized in his introduction of Sebelius.

“We have already done more to advance the cause of healthcare reform in the last month than we have in the last decade,” Obama said, taking credit for an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the billions of dollars for healthcare included in the economic stimulus bill.

Obama highlighted the need for health reform during an address before a joint session of Congress last week and released a budget that would set aside $633.8 billion for health reform.

“The president wants to get going or he wouldn’t have put that much money in the budget. He’s ready to go,” said Shalala, now the president of the University of Miami.

“We are at the perfect place to get this job done,” said Anna Burger, the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union.

But by putting his healthcare team in place at the White House and at HHS and by standing up at a White House event dedicated solely to the issue, Obama puts himself on the frontlines of a battle that Democrats in Congress and interest groups across the spectrum have been working toward for months or even years.

“There’s been a lot of good work that’s been done,” said Business Roundtable President John Castellani, “but ultimately the power and the direction that’s very, very important is the president of the United States.”

“We’re formally starting out the health reform process, but leading up to it there’s been a lot of preparation,” Pollack said.