Thursday, January 25, 2007
Families USA Conference, Washington, DC
Thank you Ron Pollack and thank you Families USA for inviting me to speak here this morning.

On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.

Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The President's latest proposal he announced this week has some elements that are interesting, but it basically does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage.

There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but let's make one thing clear right here, right now:

In the 2008 presidential campaign and Congressional campaigns all across the country, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether. It must be a question of how. We have the ideas. We have the resources. Now we have to find the will to pass a plan by the end of the next president's first term.

Let me repeat that: I am absolutely determined that, by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country. There's no reason why we can't accomplish that .

I know there's a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and there's reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. I'm sure that this campaign season will be no exception. People evaluate them for a day, and then they move on to find out who made the latest blooper or gaffe on the campaign trail. And by the time a president is sworn in, the interest groups and the partisans have torn down whatever ideas have been offered... and we're back to business as usual.

But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs. For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country.

And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process. . . .

For years, the can't-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine, burdensome taxes, rationing - that we should just stay out of the way, let the market do what it will, and tinker at the margins.

.. . .
This isn't a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, who's recently developed an interesting new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:

"For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.

. . .

At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans. . . .

And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. That's not who we are - and that's not the story of our nation's improbable progress.

Time to Push Health Care Boundaries Again
Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Now is the time to push those boundaries once more.
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Etc.
http://usliberals.about.com/od/extraordinaryspeeches/a/ObamaHealthIns.htm