Biden predicts health reform will pass after partisan battles

Vice President Joe Biden predicted Thursday that health reform would pass, but not before a contentious partisan battle, CQ Politics reports. "'As bleak as it looks ... you think about every change in health care, it passed by a couple of votes,' Biden said in response to a question following an address at the Brookings Institution. 'So we're going to get something substantial. It's going to be a lot of screaming and hollering before we get there.'" Biden added: "'I never thought I'd see the day when doctors showed up at Democratic functions. … We have never had this many stakeholders invested in the need for a fundamental change in the status quo'" (Bettelheim, 9/3).

CBS News: "As if appealing for divine intervention in the health care debate, Vice President Joe Biden crossed himself when asked this morning about the prospects for enacting the plan President Obama wants." Biden also spoke about "administration plans to modernize the health care system by computerizing all our medical records. He called the current system 'absolutely archaic'" (Knoller, 9/3).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.