President Obama Keeps Promise to Pursue Health Care Changes

It was one of his most compelling and popular campaign promises during his two-year run for the U.S. presidency. The reform of the American health care system, one that has seen the number of uninsured consistently rise to its current level of approximately 47 million people, is an issue that now-President Obama has every intention of pursuing and has taken several steps in that quest in little more than one month in office. His February 24th publicly-aired address to Congress reiterated the intention to take his plan further in no uncertain terms.

“Healthcare reform cannot wait,” Obama said, “it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.”

Nevertheless, promises certainly carry no guarantee of results. And the fight he has on his hands regarding somewhat drastic changes and a definitely heavy financial investment in the health care system is going to be an uphill battle, already finding great opposition from the Republican side of the aisle.

President Obama’s first area of concentration upon taking office was the economic stimulus package to address the overwhelming and ever-worsening financial crisis of the United States. With that having passed and signed into law, his focus turns to the budget. A proposal, one worth more than $3 trillion, has been submitted to Congress, and it contains some rather serious funds allocated to health care reform, funds in the amount of $634 billion, some of which would be obtained through new taxes on Americans with incomes of $250,000 or more per year. The rest of the money would come from a revamp of the way the government currently pays for Medicare- and Medicaid-provided health care. Through a more competitive bidding process, insurance companies who currently maintain contracts with the federal government would be paid less than in the past.

First on the list of proposals is the process of insuring tens of millions of uninsured Americans, the details of which are currently being worked out by several Democratic members of Congress. Also included in the budget is the implementation of a new system to make health care more cost-effective, such as by reducing government funding to hospitals with high readmission rates, as well as a process by which biological generic drugs would receive precedence over chemical generic drugs when it comes to federal approval in order to save money for insurance companies. And $6 billion would be set aside for cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.

While President Obama’s health care reform plans have been in the works for years, the ideas that dictate his current proposals are not without the support of research from a number of organizations, such as the Commonwealth Fund and the Institute of Medicine. Studies produced have shown that long-run costs of insuring people versus allowing them to remain uninsured and projecting subsequent costs onto the general population is more extreme than finding a way to insure them. This is especially the case with children, and such information spurred the recent signing into law of a bill to provide health care coverage to 4.1 million children via the SCHIP program. Other government-sponsored studies led to the proposal and ultimate inclusion of $1.1 billion in the recently-passed stimulus package for the analysis and comparison of medical treatments.

With more health care-related proposals in the new budget and additional legislative suggestions soon to come, there will be no shortage of discussions about the money involved, the cost-benefit analysis of it all, and the idea of the government exercising more control over various aspects of the health care system. Undoubtedly, with an Obama administration and Democratically-controlled Congress, some of the ideas will go further toward legislation than ever before.

But with such bold changes on the horizon, many in Congress, as well as in the health care field, are skeptical of their feasibility and costs. According to the Los Angeles Times, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said of the proposals, “Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable healthcare, but is increasing taxes during an economic recession…the right way to accomplish that goal?”

That is the debate. And the official debate will begin next week, as Obama plans to host a health care summit at the White House. Legislators will be joined by physicians, business owners, workers, insurance executives, and health care professionals to discuss health care reform.