Health care reform is top priority for President Obama, as he has postponed his trip to Asia to focus on his overhaul health care plan.
The president is disappointed and regrets having to delay his visit to Indonesia and Australia but has told the leaders of those nations that health is a crucial priority, said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
“The president believes right now the place for him to be is in Washington seeing this through,” Gibbs said.
The trip to Indonesia and Australia had already been pushed back from Thursday to Sunday so Obama could help Democrats on Capitol Hill rally last-minute votes for the plan, reports The Associated Press. Gibbs said that while White House staff had tried to find a way to push the trip back another few days, the president decided Thursday morning that the best course of action was to reschedule both stops until June.
“We didn’t have that kind of padding left,” Gibbs said.
House Democrats believe they are on track to vote Sunday on a $940 billion health care bill that will expand coverage to millions. If the bill passes, the Senate will begin considering changes to the bill next week. Democratic lawmakers in both houses of Congress welcomed the president’s decision to stay in town.
“He wants to be here for the history,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The trip to Indonesia was to be a homecoming of sorts for the president, who spent four years in the world’s largest Muslim country as a boy when his mother married an Indonesian man. A statue of Obama as a 10-year-old boy has been erected at the elementary school he attended.
In Australia, he was to address parliament and meet with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, with whom he shares a close relationship on the issues of climate change and the war in Afghanistan, according to the AP.
