Obama meets with Senate Democrats anxious over health care law
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President Obama on Wednesday sought to assuage anxious Democrats who are worried that ObamaCare’s troubled rollout is going to come back to haunt them during the 2014 midterm elections.
“There’s a lot of pent-up frustration” among Senate Democrats who are facing voters next year, a party source familiar with the meeting told Fox News.
A Democratic source told Fox News’ Ed Henry that some of the senators in the room floated a delay of up to one year in the law’s implementation – an idea the president rejected. The source said, however, that senators left the White House feeling that it was a “constructive meeting.”
The meeting could suggest that momentum is building for Democrats to force changes to the law. A letter circulated in late October among Democratic senators urged the Obama administration to delay enforcement of the health care law’s individual mandate, a recommendation supported by senators Mark Pryor, D-Ark., Mary Landrieu, D-La., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Mark Begich, D-Alaska, and Kay Hagan, D-N.C., all of whom were present at Wednesday’s meeting.
Also present at the meeting were Cory Booker, D-N.J., Chris Coons, D-Del., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Al Franken, D-Minn., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Mark Udall, D-Colo., Tom Udall, D-Ariz., Mark Warner, D-Va., and Michael Bennett, D-Colo.
Only five Democratic senators who are up for re-election next year did not attend the meeting. Four of those senators – Max Baucus, D-Mont., Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Tim Johnson, D-S.D. – are retiring, leaving just Ed Markey, D-Mass., as the only non-retiring Democrat whose seat is up next year who did not attend the meeting.
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