President Barack Obama made the case for health reform to Congress — and to the American people — last night:
Our collective failure to meet this challenge — year after year, decade after decade — has led us to the breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can’t get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can’t afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or too expensive to cover.
We are the only democracy — the only advanced democracy on Earth — the only wealthy nation — that allows such hardship for millions of its people. There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two-year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone…
The time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.
(Watch the speech in streaming video here)
Reax from around the Web…
If Obama hasn’t created the perfect plan, he’s created something arguably more impressive: a plan that actually might pass. That plan might not do enough to change the system, and it may not spend enough to protect everybody, but there is plenty in the proposal that will better the lives, health coverage, and financial security for millions of real people.
There’s a third way to think about the speech. You can see if was about something more than health care reform—specifically, whether it was an effort to say something broader, about how our society is organized and how we might be able to change it.
I think it was, if you listened long enough. And I liked what I heard, even if Obama said it in his typically nuanced way.
This was not a home-run kind of speech; he was trying to leg this one out, and say a lot of different things to satisfy a lot of different constituencies. But I think it was a stand-up triple.
I suspect the speech did its job. Congress will pass some form of health-care reform this year, probably something very close to what the President proposed. But it will not end the public malignancy that has attended this debate and threatens the democratic fabric of our nation.
Taken together I thought President Obama did a solid job laying out the essential elements of his reform, rebuking the liars and laying out some beginnings of an elevating vision of just what this whole effort is about.
Just what the effect will be, I find it difficult to predict. In part that is because so much of the pushback over August (not withstanding reasonable policy disagreements with the broad outlines we know of Obama’s reform) has been a hash of paranoia, organized lying and militant frivolity that I’m not sure it’s an easy thing to judge the direction of this in anything approaching rational terms.
If people are buying that, maybe the debate is just broken beyond repair?
But that’s the pundits. What did you think of the speech? Sound off in the comments.