US Congress passes historic health care bill
Barack Obama earned his first major victory as United States president when Congress voted to pass a health care reform bill by a narrow margin on Sunday. The House of Representatives voted by 219-212 in favour of legislation that will extend health care coverage to 32 million Americans.
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The bill had already been passed by the Senate and it will now be signed into law by Obama.
"Tonight we answered the call of history as so many Americans have before us,” Obama said after the vote. “We did not avoid our responsibility - we embraced it. We did not fear our future - we shaped it.”
Obama made health care one of his key priorities after becoming president but he has seen his poll ratings drop sharply following a year-long effort to get the bill passed.
Analysis: Philip Golub, American University of Paris
As the vote count moved past the 216 needed to ensure passage on Sunday, jubilant Democrats called out Obama’s “Yes, we can” 2008 presidential campaign slogan.
All 178 Republicans, joined by 34 conservative Democrats, opposed the measure, which will extend coverage to 95 per cent of the under-65 population.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost 940 billion dollars over the next 10 years. However, they say it would cut 143 billion dollars from the US deficit by 2019 and 1.2 trillion over the following decade.
Philip Golub, a politics lecturer at the American University of Paris, told RFI that the vote was a "major political step forward" for Obama.
"The Republican party today is an increasingly elderly, white, male political party, which is extraordinarily conservative in its outlook," he said.
"Contrary to what many of the media commentators are saying, although there is opposition to health care reform... the deeper reality is this will open the way for further advances on other levels."
Golub said the Democrats will probably suffer losses in mid-term elections in November but that this would be more to do with the economic crisis rather than the debate over health care.
As regards the bill itself, he said that critics of its cost have gone a little over the top.
"It's true of course that the health care package is going to initially increase the budget deficit in the United States. That’s inevitable.
"On the other hand since it also will lead to a more rational health care system, over the middle-term and in the long run, it will actually reduce costs. So all these proclamations regarding the financial situation are in fact, in a certain sense, wild exaggerations."
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