In an
interview with
TIME's Karen Tumulty published Wednesday, President Obama expressed a certain amount of bewilderment on the issue of health care reform. The case for reform is so damned obvious, so why is it such a tough sell?
And I will say that this has been the most difficult test for me so far in public life, trying to describe in clear, simple terms how important it is that we reform this system. The case is so clear to me. And when I sit with our policy advisors — we had somebody here sitting right there this morning who is a medical expert, worked at McKinsey for a while, he's now working on our health care team — and he just ran through: We pay 77 percent more on prescription drugs, we're paying $6,000 more per individual on health care than any other industrialized nation; here's all the failures in the delivery system that account for it. It's not just because we are somehow more obese or more unhealthy. It turns out actually we're a little bit healthier than most of these other countries because our smoking rates are lower and we're younger. So we should actually be paying less than they are.
And when you just start hearing the litany of facts, what you say to yourself is this shouldn't be such a hard case to make, because the American consumer is really not getting a good deal.
People are getting screwed -- in many cases, literally to death -- by the current system, people
know they're getting screwed, yet this isn't the slam dunk it should be. As I pointed out
yesterday, the people are with Obama on the broad strokes -- the elements of
his plan are easily the most popular. Even considering
early mistakes in managing the reform project, Obama should be leading the debate... [
CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
