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Obama ‘confident’ of health care overhaul
U.S. is closer to ‘reform than we have ever been,’ he writes on op-ed piece
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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - President Barack Obama has made it clear that his efforts to reform the U.S. health care system have meaning to him personally.
On Saturday, Obama invoked his own anguish over the death of a loved one as he challenged the notion that Democratic efforts to overhaul the nation's health care would include "death panels" that decided who would get care and who wouldn't.
"I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it's like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate and have to struggle with that," an impassioned Obama told a crowd as he spoke of Madelyn Payne Dunham. He took issue with "the notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma."
"When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest — especially when I hear the arguments coming from members of Congress in the other party who, turns out, sponsored similar provisions," Obama said.
Reforming the U.S. health care system is Obama's top domestic priority and arguably his most challenging political fight yet as president, in no small part because of the vast number of diverse stake-holders involved.
Issue touches everyone
His goal is to ensure health care for everyone in a country with the world's costliest system and an estimated 48 million uninsured people.
It's an issue that touches everyone in the United States. There are thickets of competing interests among patients, doctors, drug makers, insurers, labor, businesses and others.
Any plan must get through a Democratic-controlled Congress, where many lawmakers are up for re-election next year. Also, there's an ideological fault line between Democrats and Republicans, and liberals and conservatives over the level of government involvement in health care.
Obama said he remains "confident" that in the end his drive to overhaul the U.S. health care system will succeed.
"We are already closer to achieving health insurance reform than we have ever been," Obama wrote in an op-ed piece published Sunday in The New York Times.
Obama cited support for reforms from the American Nurses Association; the American Medical Association, which represents many doctors, and the influential seniors' advocacy group AARP, among others.
"We have broad agreement in Congress on about 80 percent of what we're trying to do," he added.
Millions struggle quietly every day
While the media has focused in recent weeks on the "loudest voices" opposing his reforms, Obama said millions of Americans are quietly struggling every day "with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them."
Obama wrote that his reforms were intended to provide a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage for millions of uninsured Americans; bring skyrocketing health care costs under control; make the government-run Medicare program for seniors more efficient; and provide basic consumer protections to hold insurance companies accountable.
"For all the scare tactics out there, what's truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing," Obama wrote.
In a debate in which he often sounds professor-like, Obama on Saturday spoke at the town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colo., with a rare bit of emotion that seemed to counter that of vocal health care opponents as he referenced the beloved grandmother who helped raise him and who he called "Toot."
She died of cancer at age 86 on Nov. 2, two days before he won election to become the nation's first African-American president.
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